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Friday, May 16, 2008 - 8:59 PM
Doctors and politicians in search of the magic bullet to solve the so-called medical malpractice crisis have focused on a pie-in-the-sky solution that won’t fly politically or constitutionally – the $250,000 cap on pain and suffering. That would take a constitutional amendment, which requires something close to a political consensus. That political consensus will never happen due to the determined and effective opposition of the trial lawyers and most consumer organizations, and the difficulties inherent in passing any constitutional amendment at the state or federal level. What’s worse, the public, even if half-informed, would reject the concept, of a cap on damages. It is obviously unfair and off the wall.
In the process of primary focus on a solution that will never happen these interest groups are missing the more obvious, the more practical and the more immediate solutions that may produce bigger and quicker premium reductions. To find these solutions all the doctors and politicians would have to do is to read a memo dated February 28, 2002, entitled “Suggestions to Effect Immediate Premium Savings for Health Care Providers.” The memo was written by John H. Reed, then the Director of the Cat Fund (now an attorney in private practice in Sellingsgrove, Pennsylvania), and his Deputy Director, Robert W. Waeger.
Here are a few of their recommendations, which should be given immediate and serious consideration, but which have been ignored by doctors and politicians and legislators and by the insurance commissioner and the insurance industry (the latter two groups being in perpetual hibernation when it comes to new ideas or basic reforms of the present system).
LET STATE PROVIDE MEDICAL MALPRACTICE COVERAGE THROUGH CAT FUND. Now doctors have to go to commercial insurers for the first $500,000 of coverage (the excess over that $500,000 primary limit is now provided by the CAT Fund).
The commercial insurance companies don’t want to write the business. Fine. They should have no complaints when the state of Pennsylvania fills the vacuum. As the memo in question indicates, the Cat Fund could provide the first $500,000 coverage for 40 percent less than the commercial insurance industry. That would be possible, as the state through the Cat Fund, would have a lower expense ratio. They would not have to pay commissions to agents or support a major marketing structure. The Cat Fund would not have to earn and pay a profit to shareholders. It would not have to pay taxes. It would not have to support the corporate structure that goes with any commercial insurance operation. The CAT Fund pays out in claims 99 cents on the dollar of collected premiums; commercial insurers, in contrast, pay out 60 to 65 cents on the dollar in claims, with 35 to 40 cents going for marketing, commissions, profits, etc.
CUT REQUIREMENT OF $500,000 IN PRIMARY COVERAGE TO $200,000. Now each doctor must buy $500,000 in commercial insurance and the rest if sold by the state-operated CAT fund. If this $500,000 requirement were cut to $200,000, the Reed-Waeger Memo estimates premiums would be reduced by at least 25 to 35 percent. This would also increase the market for malpractice as commercial insurers would have to shoulder less risk, and that in turn would improve the competitive environment. It would also make it easier for doctors to use self-insurance, risk retention groups (RRGs), fronted captives and other alternatives to commercial insurance (see next reform on RRGs). This change could come about without adoption of the first recommended change.
PROMOTE USE OF RRGs. The Risk Retention Group is a self-insurance device, which involves doctors banding together in non-profit groups to self-insure their coverage. It is a min-insurance company. The reduction of the primary requirement from $500,000 to $200,000, as suggested above, would make this approach easier to undertake. Although not mentioned in the MEMO, Reed recommends that a solvency fund be created to cover RRGs for medical malpractice. This was a recommendation he did make in testifying before the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce on February 10, 2003. Now RRGs are not so covered, and this means that doctors would have a dangerous exposure if the RRG would go under. With commercial insurance companies, there is a solvency fund back-up and if this were extended to RRGs, they would become more popular and could make a larger contribution to the solution of any problems in obtaining reasonably priced medical malpractice insurance. The MEMO estimates that some specialists could cut their premiums by 60 to70 percent with RRGs.
COMPRESS RATE SCHEDULE. Now there is incredible variation in premiums between so-called high-risk specialists and lower-risk categories of doctors. Premiums are so tailored to each category of doctors that the insurance function of spreading risk does not work as effectively as it might. Compressing rate schedules means that the differences between the highest and lowest risk categories would be reduced, thus lowering the burden on the higher risk specialties and spreading risk more evenly. The Memo says, if the lowest risk groups paid $1,000 more, the higher risks groups could be cut by up to l/3rd.
CONCLUSION. The MEMO has a good summary of what these recommended changes might do: “What now seems to be a looming crisis can be averted. All of the above options … will immediately reduce malpractice premiums to health care providers. Most importantly, they can accomplish that result without taking money from taxpayers, without triggering the additional expense of borrowing, without burdening future generations of health care providers, and without having to bar the door of the courthouse to those individuals having legitimate claims.” (c)2003 Herbert S. Denenberg All Rights Reserved.
When it comes to trade, chimps are far from venture capitalists. Our closest relatives almost always prefer a sure bet, according to a recent study, choosing value in hand over risk for higher returns. The finding brings us closer to understanding chimps’ trading habits and gives us precious insight into how trade, an essential cooperative behavior, works for humans.
To conduct the study, researchers started with two groups of chimps: one with little exposure to social and cognitive testing and no trading experience, and one with extensive bartering practice and language training. The scientists determined which food each chimp liked best. Then they assigned values to the foods. Finally, they taught the inexperienced chimps how to trade with tokens and food.
The results? When chimps possessing items of medium-high value, such as carrots, were offered high-value items, like grapes, they kept the lesser food. This tendency held true for both groups, despite different rearing histories, suggesting that their disinclination to barter is innate, says Sarah Brosnan of Georgia State University, the lead researcher in this study.
The chimps’ risk-averse behavior, Brosnan speculates, is attributable to a lack of language skills. “If one chimp could say to another, ‘OK, you crack nuts while I hunt meat, and then we’ll trade,’ they’d be able to specialize and have a developed economy,” Brosnan says. Because humans can specialize, she adds, we can generate surplus to purchase or barter for better foods from one another.
There's no other major item most of us own that is as confusing, unpredictable and unreliable as our personal computers. Everybody has questions about them, and we aim to help.
Here are a few questions about computers I've received recently from people like you, and my answers. I have edited and restated the questions a bit, for readability.
Q. I have moved from a PC to the iMac. In the Windows environment, I felt a need to run utilities to clean out the registry and defragment the hard disk frequently. Is this also needed on the iMac? If so, what programs are recommended?
A. The Mac operating system, called OS X Leopard, doesn't include a registry, which is a feature of Windows that holds information that programs need to operate properly. So there's no need to clean or maintain any registry on a Mac.
Mac hard disks, like those on Windows computers, can get fragmented -- a condition in which parts of files are so scattered around on the disk that the disk runs slowly. However, the operating system has some under-the-covers features that generally obviate the need to run a defragmentation utility. In fact, Apple, which calls defragmenting a disk "optimizing" it, flatly claims that "You probably won't need to optimize at all if you use Mac OS X." There are some Mac defragmentation utilities, but I don't believe you will need them unless you have large numbers of extremely large files and almost no free disk space.
Q. My son's computer frequently gets infected with adware, pop-ups. Recently it was hit with a continuing pop-up ad called VirusHeat that touted itself as a solution to the computer's problems. When I paid for VirusHeat, the problems went away. Is it legitimate?
A. According to numerous reports on the Web, including some from security companies, VirusHeat is a form of malicious or misleading software. It falls into a category that attempts to scare people into thinking their computers are badly infected, or exaggerates any problems you may have. This is a common tactic now used by creators of malware.
Some of these fake or misleading "security programs" may be designed merely to make you pay. Others may even be designed to install the very kinds of viruses, spyware or adware that they claim to fight.
Q. I have updated to a new PC. My data are on a floppy disc. There is no floppy disc drive on this new computer. How can I transfer my data?
A. For around $25, you can buy an external floppy disk drive that plugs into a new PC using its standard USB port. If you do so, and connect it to the new PC, you should be able to copy your data to the new computer's hard disk.
Ohio AG Marc Dann has resigned amid the scandal of a sexual harassment investigation in his office and his extramarital affair. Dann, 46, led the state on a 10-day odyssey, at first refusing to resign despite demands by Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland and others within his party, a growing number of investigations into conduct at his office, and the filing Tuesday of articles of impeachment against him. (Find past LB coverage of the Dann scandal here and here.)
Two Fridays ago, Dann admitted to a “romantic relationship” with a member of his staff, prompting Democratic leaders such as Governor Ted Strickland to call for his Dann’s head. But despite a letter that Strickland and others sent to Dann, arguing that he’d lost “even the most remote hope” of continuing to serve effectively as AG, Dann told his staff that he was optimistic about plans to stay in office despite an impeachment threat. “I think that there is a great chance that we can continue to do great work for the people of the state.”
The great work that Dann, who was elected to his first term in 2006, referred to may have been his crusade against ratings agencies and his pursuit of mortgage lenders and brokers for allegedly inflating home prices and contributing to the subprime crisis. Click here for a past WSJ profile of Dann, titled “The Mortgage Cop.”
But yesterday, when Ohio democrats sprung into action, filing articles of impeachment against Dann, he appeared to lose his mettle. What followed was 24 hours of speculation that Dann would resign.
How would you like to carry around your entire DVD collection on a single disk? That is the promise of a new holo–graphic digital storage technology being developed by General Electric and coming to a computer near you around 2012. Although not the first commercial holographic storage system—that honor goes to InPhase Technologies’ Tapestry™ 300r holographic drive—GE’s system could be the first one aimed at consumers. (InPhase’s holographic drives, which debuted last year, sell for $18,000 and target broadcasters who need to archive television programs.)
Holographic media can store huge amounts of data because information is encoded in layers throughout the entire disk, not just on a single reflective surface as in today’s optical media. In GE’s system, a single CD-size disk made of plastic will be able to store about 1 terabyte of data, equivalent to 110 typical movie DVDs. http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-jmbPCHg9dLPh1gHoZxLG.GpS
Louis J. Sheehan Esquire
This kind of capacity would make it possible to back up all your music, photos, home movies, and e-mails in one place; it would also allow for totally new, extremely data-intensive applications, such as Micro–soft’s MyLifeBits project, which aims to capture in digital form every–thing that happens in an individual’s life. Besides automatically archiving and indexing things like e-mails and text documents, the project includes a wearable camera that snaps a picture at least once every 30 seconds, creating a visual index of every day.
To store data holographically, a laser beam (1) is split in two (2). One half of the beam passes through an array of hundreds of thousands of gates (3). Each gate can be opened or closed to represent a binary 1 or 0. The gates either block or pass the beam, filtering it into a coded pattern, or signal. The other half of the beam, known as the reference beam, is bounced off a mirror (4), so that the reference beam and the signal beam encoded with digital information intersect somewhere within the plastic storage medium (5). Light waves from the two beams interfere with each other, imprinting into the plastic a hologram—a three-dimensional pattern. By varying the angle of the mirror, millions of holograms can be created in the same piece of plastic. To read data from storage, the reference beam alone is used to illuminate the hologram. The resulting image can be read by a sensor and converted back into 1s and 0s.
Contrary to public opinion, salted nuts aren't necessarily high in sodium. Because salt is present on the surface of the nut, it's tasted immediately. In actuality, a 1-ounce serving (or 49 kernels) of pistachios only contains 5% DV of sodium. As an option, raw pistachios are sodium free.
A good snack can be part of a healthy eating plan by helping stabilize blood sugar, satisfy hunger between meals, supply extra nutrients including fiber, and keep energy levels high and your mind alert.
Naturally trans-fat and cholesterol-free, and one of the lowest calorie, lowest fat nuts, pistachios make an ideal snack choice. Tasty and delicious, pistachios are the most nutrient dense nut, offering a good source of eight important nutrients including thiamin, vitamin B6, copper, manganese, potassium, fiber, phosphorus and magnesium. http://louisjsheehan.blogstream.com/
Also, among snack nuts, pistachios contain the highest amounts of polyphenol antioxidants. While the role of antioxidants is still unknown, research suggests that a diet of foods containing antioxidants is smart eating.
Pistachios help your heart in four ways. First, most of the fat found in pistachios is "good" unsaturated fat, which can lower blood cholesterol and the risk of heart disease when replacing saturated fat in the diet. Second, pistachios offer the highest levels of cholesterol-busting phytosterols among snack nuts, and are a good source of fiber, both of which reduce the absorption of cholesterol from the diet. Also, among snack nuts, pistachios are the highest in polyphenols, antioxidants with potential heart health benefits6. Finally, pistachios offer potassium. An inadequate intake of potassium is characterized by increased blood pressure and may increase the risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke.
You'll also find pistachios included in the FDA's first ever qualified health claim for conventional food, which states: "Scientific evidence suggests, but does not prove, that eating 1.5 ounces per day of most nuts, such as pistachios, as part of a diet low in saturated fat and cholesterol may reduce the risk of heart disease." http://www.soulcast.com/post/show/117748/move
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Your body needs fat to function. But the wrong kind - saturated fat - can raise cholesterol levels increasing the risk of heart disease. Most of the fat found in pistachios - almost 90% - is "good" unsaturated fat. When unsaturated fats replace saturated fats - those found in meats, baked goods and full fat dairy products - they can help lower blood cholesterol along with the risk of heart disease.
Many nutritionists agree that, when eaten in moderation, good fats, along with protein, helps dieters feel full longer. It's also good to know that because pistachios are dry roasted, they are naturally trans-fat free. According to the American Heart Association, trans-fats raise total blood cholesterol levels and LDL ("bad") cholesterol and lower HDL ("good") cholesterol levels; in turn increasing the risk of coronary heart disease and increases the risk of stroke.
Pistachios make a superior snack choice for dieters. One reason is that they are nutrient dense - good news when every calorie counts. Also, many experts believe that because pistachios have both protein and fiber they help you feel full for longer - so you eat less at your next meal. One such expert is Tanya Zuckerbrot, registered dietitian, mother of three and author of the "F Factor Diet: Discovering the Secret to Permanent Weight Loss," who recommends foods containing fiber, such as pistachios, to help weight loss.
Did you know that most Americans fall short of the recommended daily amount for fiber? Fiber is important because it aids digestion, promotes satiety and helps maintain a healthy body weight. Tanya recommends a handful of delicious pistachios as a morning or afternoon snack as an easy way to add an extra 3 grams or more of natural fiber to your diet along with protein.
You may be surprised to know that nut consumption, in general, is associated with a lower body mass index and has not been shown to cause gain. In fact, many popular diet plans including DASH Diet, Mediterranean Diet, Weight Watchers and the USDA Food Pyramid, highlight nuts in their healthy eating plans. Some even believe that the simple act of shelling a pistachio may have the added benefit of slowing down consumption time.
Herb Denenberg has been an investigative and consumer reporter and columnist for over 25 years. Before that he served as Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner, Pennsylvania Public Utility Commissioner, and Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
He was the consumer and investigative reporter for the CBS and then the NBC TV station in Philadelphia for 25 years, and more recently served in that capacity at the Harron Cable Update and the Adelphia Cable update, both nightly newscasts, and for the Tri-State Media All-News Cable Network. He is also a columnist for a group of papers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey and appears as an expert witness cases against insurance companies involving bad faith denial of claims and other matters.
He is now an adjunct professor of information science and technology at Cabrini College. He has also served as an assistant professor of insurance at the University of Iowa and a professor of law at Temple University.
He has won hundreds of awards for his media work, including 40 Emmys, the Consumer Service Award of the Consumer Federation of American, the Award of Achievement from the American Board of Trial Advocates, an award for the best in consumer journalism from the National Press Club and a Lambert Award for contributions to the health care delivery system.
During Denenberg's tenure as Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner, Ralph Nader wrote, "He's clearly the most consumer-oriented insurance commissioner in American history." As a result of the health care reforms he implemented as Commissioner, he was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. His motto as Insurance Commissioner, was "Populus Iamdudam Defutatus Est" which translated from the Latin is "The Consumer Has Been Screwed Long Enough."
Denenberg is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University (B.S.), Creighton University School of Law (J.D.), Harvard University School of Law (LL.M.), and the University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D.). He also received two honorary degrees, a Doctor of Humane Letters from Spring Garden College and a Doctor of Laws from Allentown College. He is a CPCU (Chartered Property and Casualty Underwriter) and a CLU (Chartered Life Underwriter).
For three years he served in the Judge Advocate General's Corps of the U.S. Army as a first lieutenant and and was a captain in the reserves.
He is the author of seven books and hundreds of articles on insurance, law, and consumer affairs. He has testified many times before Congressional committees, state legislative committees, and the City Council of Philadelphia.
He has served on the board of Consumers Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports, and is now on the board of the Sapio Institute (on interactive learning) and the Center for Proper Medication Use. He served as President of the American Risk and Insurance Association. He recently authored a Shopper's Guide to Herbal Medicine, published by the Center, and a more complete version of that guide which is to appear on their Web Site at www.cpmu.org.
Denenberg has served as consultant to the US Department of Labor, the US Small Business Administration, the National Commission on Product Safety, the FTC, the US Department of Justice, the US Department of Transportation, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Philadelphia School Board, the State of Alaska and Nevada, the United States Commission on Civil Rights, and other government agencies. He was special counsel and research director of the President's National Advisory Panel on Insurance in Riot-Affected Areas; associate director of the Wisconsin Legislature's Law Revision Committee, special counsel to the Mayor of Washington D.C., and general counsel of the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission. He was a co-author of the first no-fault law passed in a United States jurisdiction (the Social Protection Plan of Puerto Rico). He also instituted a long list of fundamental reforms as Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner.
Denenberg has an entry in Who's Who in America, Who's Who In Insurance, Who's Who in Health Care, Who's Who in Science and Engineering, Current Biography, American Men of Science, Who's Who In World Jewry and other standard biographical reference. His biography, authored by Howard Shapiro, is entitled "How to Keep Them Honest" and was published by Rodale Press.
1 oz serving size of pistachios, about 30 grams shelled, yields about 160 calories. That measures out to be about 49 kernels per ounce - which can make for a very satisfying snack. http://louis_j_sheehan.today.com/2008/03/08/gravity/
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Pistachios are naturally low in carbohydrates and rich in monounsaturated fatty acids (MUFA), making them a perfect snack for diabetics following recommended dietary guidelines. Clinical trials have found that diets following such guidelines help maintain blood sugar and insulin levels and reduce risk factors for heart disease, a consequence that accounts for greater than 65% of diabetic deaths. In fact, a 2007 study conducted at the University of Toronto showed that when pistachios are eaten with other high-carbohydrate foods, they slow absorption of carbohydrates into the body, resulting in lower-than-expected blood sugar levels. MUFA-rich foods of plant origins, such as pistachios, contain fiber, phytosterols and antioxidants, which confer a variety of cardiovascular benefits including glycemic control, improved lipid profiles, and reduced LDL oxidation.
It's important to know that the true prevalence of food allergy in the U.S. is not as great as the public perceives it to be. According to the American Academy of Asthma, Allergy and Immunology (AAAI) estimates for 2006 suggest that food allergy of all types affects about 4% of the total population, with prevalence in children generally higher than that for adults. About 90% of food allergies in the US and in many other parts of the world derive from milk, eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, fish, shellfish, wheat and soy. Diagnosis of food allergy, including allergies to nuts, can be problematic because no single laboratory test available today can conclusively confirm that a person will exhibit clinical symptoms in response to consumption of a suspect food. For most people with food allergies, symptoms that occur after consuming the offending food are merely annoying such as a runny nose or itchy skin.
Tree nut allergies are rare in the general population. The best estimates available suggests that allergy to no single tree nut exceeds about .4% of the U.S. population, whereas separate estimates for peanuts suggest the prevalence is about 0.8 percent. If you're concerned about any food allergies, consult your physician.
A 1-oz serving of in-shell pistachios (about 30 grams or 1⁄2 cup), typically retails for about 30¢, a favorable comparison, price-wise, to popular salted snacks such as ready-to-eat popcorn. More importantly, however, you'll find that a handful of pistachios provides significant nutritional value and helps keep hunger satisfied.
You probably already know that junk snacks provide little nutritional value per calorie and can lead to obesity and a number of related illnesses. http://sheehan.myblogsite.com/
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When you consider food on a dollar per nutrient basis, healthy choices are not necessarily more expensive. In fact, while you may think you're saving money by choosing a processed "junk" snack, in the long run the choice may be more expensive. Consider the following:
Healthy foods such as fruits, vegetables and nuts are more satiating - so you feel fuller, longer. Plus they provide your body with vitamins, minerals, and nutrients needed to stay healthy. Pistachios offer good nutritional value: the most nutrient-dense tree nut*, pistachios are also among the highest fiber nuts, and also offer the highest amounts of phytosterols and antioxidants. One of the lowest calorie, lowest fat nuts, pistachios are also fun to eat.
And for those people with moderately high cholesterol levels, studies show that a snack of pistachios, when used as a replacement for high-fat snacks, can cut both total and "bad" LDL cholesterol while offering cardioprotective nutrients such as magnesium, potassium and copper. http://louis9j9sheehan.blog.com/2841488/
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http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page1.aspxGood news for heart health!
Many people are surprised to learn that studies show pistachios actually help lower cholesterol. That's because almost 90% of the fat in pistachios is unsaturated (monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats), which can reduce blood cholesterol levels when they replace saturated fats in the diet. In addition to offering heart healthy unsaturated fats, pistachios provide important antioxidants and amino acids that reduce the risk of heart disease. And among nuts, pistachios have the highest content of phytosterols, a plant sterol shown to reduce cholesterol absorption from other foods.
microkernel family.
Pistachio nuts, dry roasted, w/o salt
Nutritional value per 100 g (3.5 oz)
Energy 570 kcal 2390 kJ
Carbohydrates 27.65 g
- Sugars 7.81 g
- Dietary fiber 10.3 g
Fat 45.97 g
Protein 21.35 g
Thiamin (Vit. B1) 0.84 mg 65%
Riboflavin (Vit. B2) 0.158 mg 11%
Niacin (Vit. B3) 1.425 mg 10%
Pantothenic acid (B5) 0.513 mg 10%
Vitamin B6 1.274 mg 98%
Folate (Vit. B9) 50 μg 13%
Vitamin C 2.3 mg 4%
Calcium 110 mg 11%
Iron 4.2 mg 34%
Magnesium 120 mg 32%
Phosphorus 485 mg 69%
Potassium 1042 mg 22%
Zinc 2.3 mg 23%
Manganese 1.275 mg
Percentages are relative to US
recommendations for adults.
Source: USDA Nutrient database
The pistachio (Pistacia vera L., Anacardiaceae; sometimes placed in Pistaciaceae) is a small tree up to 10 m tall, native to mountainous regions of Iran, Turkmenistan and western Afghanistan. It has deciduous pinnate leaves 10–20 cm long.
The plants are dioecious, with separate male and female trees. The flowers are apetalous and unisexual, and borne in panicles. The fruit is a drupe, containing an elongated seed (a nut in the culinary sense, but not a true botanical nut) with a hard, whitish shell and a striking kernel which has a mauvish skin and light green flesh, with a distinctive flavour. http://blogs.ebay.com/mytymouse1/home/_W0QQentrysyncidZ526811010
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When the fruit ripens, the husk changes from green to an autumnal yellow/red and the shells split partially open (see photo). This is known as dehiscence, and happens with an audible pop.
Each pistachio nut weighs around 1 gram, and each pistachio tree averages around 50 kg of nuts, or around 50,000, every two years. Pistachios (as part of the pistacia genus) have existed for about 80 million years
P. vera) was first cultivated in Western Asia. It reached the Mediterranean world by way of central Iran, where it has long been an important crop. Although known to the Romans, the pistachio nut appears not to have reached the Mediterranean or most of the Near East in any quantity before medieval times.
The kernels are often eaten whole, either fresh or roasted and salted, and are also used in ice cream and confections such as baklava. In July 2003, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first qualified health claim specific to nuts lowering the risk of heart disease: "Scientific evidence suggests but does not prove that eating 1.5 ounces (42.5g) per day of most nuts, such as pistachios, as part of a diet low in saturated fat and cholesterol may reduce the risk of heart disease". In research at Pennsylvania State University, pistachios in particular significantly reduced levels of LDL, the 'bad' cholesterol, in the blood of volunteers. Pennsylvania State University's Department of Nutrition and Sciences has also conducted related research on other health benefits of pistachios, including an April 2007 study concluding that pistachios may calm acute stress reaction,and a June 2007 study on the cardiovascular health benefits of eating pistachios. http://web.mac.com/lousheehan/Site/Garage_Before_and_After.html
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On the Greek island of Chios, the husk or flesh of the pistachio fruit surrounding the shell is cooked and preserved in syrup.
The shell of the pistachio is naturally a beige colour, but it is sometimes dyed red or green in commercial pistachios. Originally the dye was applied by importers to hide stains on the shells caused when the nuts were picked by hand. However most pistachios are now picked by machine and the shells remain unstained, making dyeing unnecessary (except that some consumers have been led to expect coloured pistachios). Roasted pistachio nuts can be artificially turned red if they are marinated prior to roasting in a salt and strawberry marinade, or salt and citrus salts.
The trees are planted in orchards, and take approximately seven to ten years to reach significant production. Production is alternate bearing or biennial bearing, meaning the harvest is heavier in alternate years. Peak production is reached at approximately 20 years. Trees are usually pruned to size to make the harvest easier. One male tree produces enough pollen for eight to twelve nut-bearing females. Pistachio orchards can be damaged by the fungal disease Botryosphaeria panicle and shoot blight, which kills the flowers and young shoots.
Pistachio trees are fairly hardy in the right conditions, and can survive temperature ranges between -10°C (14°F) in winter to 40°C (104°F) in summer. They need a sunny position and well-drained soil. Pistachio trees do poorly in conditions of high humidity, and are susceptible to root rot in winter if they get too much water and the soil is not sufficiently free draining. Long hot summers are required for proper ripening of the fruit.
Pistachio nuts are highly flammable when stored in large quantities, and are prone to self heating and spontaneous combustion.
Share of a total 2005 worldwide production of 501 thousand metric tonnes:
Country Production
(tonnes)
Iran 190 000
U.S. 140 000
Turkey 60 000
Syria 60 000
China 34 000
Greece 9 500
Italy 2 400
Uzbekistan 1 000
Tunisia 800
Pakistan 200
Madagascar 160
Kyrgyzstan 100
Morocco 50
Cyprus 15
Mexico 7
Mauritius 5
California produces almost all U.S. pistachios, and about half of these are exported, mainly to China, Japan, Europe and Canada. Almost all California pistachios are of the cultivar 'Kerman'. The tree is grafted to a rootstock when the rootstock is one year old. Only a few years after California growers started growing pistachios, the 1979 crisis in Iran would give stronger commercial impetus to the American-based pistachio nut industry. Previous to that time, most Westerners were familiar with only the slightly smaller, deeply red-hued (dyed) nuts produced mainly in Iran, where it is the second largest export after oil. http://louisajasheehan.blogspot.com/
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So late to be “discovered” by the rest of the world—Henry Stanley made the continent's first crossing only in 1877—Africa, it can be forgotten, is probably the cradle of humanity. Palaeoanthropologists, archaeologists and, more recently, geneticists have all bolstered the “out of Africa” theory, which holds that early man wandered out of the Rift Valley. Yet little is known of pre-colonial African cultures. Some vanished out of history, along with their languages and beliefs, before they ever came to be named. That is one reason why Africa's rock art is so precious. The faintest ochre scratches of prehistoric antelope in a cave open a rare window into Africa's—and humanity's—distant past.
Africa may have 200,000 rock-art sites, more than any other continent. The oldest known site, in Namibia, is between 18,000 and 28,000 years old. Several African universities now have programmes to decipher the paintings and carvings. They are being helped by the Kenya-based Trust for African Rock Art (TARA), which seeks to discover and digitally archive as much of the art as it can for future scholars.
The best is in the Sahara desert, particularly in Niger's Air mountains, in the Tibesti mountains of northern Chad and southern Libya, and in south-east Algeria's Tassili n'Ajjer range. Such desert sites are too remote to be damaged by graffiti, though wars involving the local Tuareg have resulted in some being shot up or smashed apart for sale to foreign collectors. David Coulson, one of TARA's founders, raves about a recent find in the Tassili n'Ajjer range: an anatomically perfect four-metre-long carving of a hippo hunted by an Egyptian-looking figure with a superbly sinuous bow. This in a region that dried up several thousand years ago.
Elsewhere in Africa, rock art often chronicles the hunting magic of Bushmen and Pygmies. Not much rock art survives in western Africa, and in eastern and central parts of the continent more recent but still invaluable paintings have been poorly preserved.
But there is progress. Locals are being encouraged to see the value of showing off their sites to tourists. National museums are being overhauled, with new displays of lost peoples. New history textbooks may follow. New finds are being made. A sensational discovery in a cave in Kenya is being kept under wraps until it can be properly dated.
Some think African rock art should provide a pan-African rallying point, free of politics or religion. A rich rock-art heritage could connect Libya and South Africa, two of the African Union's biggest backers, which sometimes struggle to find anything in common. Kofi Annan, a former UN secretary-general, is a big rock-art fan. He reckons it represents nothing less than the earliest record of the human imagination.
First, ask yourself how hungry you are, on a scale of 1 (ravenous) to 7 (stuffed). http://louiscjcsheehan.blogspot.com/
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Next, take time to appreciate the food on your plate. Notice the colors and textures.
Take a bite. Slowly experience the tastes on your tongue. Put down your fork and savor.
"Most people don't think about what they're eating -- they're focusing on the next bite," says Sasha Loring, a psychotherapist at Duke Integrative Medicine, part of Duke University Health System here. "I've worked with lots of obese people -- you'd think they'd enjoy food. But a lot of them say they haven't really tasted what they've been shoveling down for years."
Over lunch, Ms. Loring is teaching me how to eat mindfully -- paying attention to what you eat and stopping just before you're full, ideally about 51⁄2 on that 7-point scale. Many past diet plans have stressed not overeating. What's different about mindful eating is the paradoxical concept that eating just a few mouthfuls, and savoring the experience, can be far more satisfying than eating an entire cake mindlessly.
• Assess how hungry you are.
• Eat slowly; savor your food.
• Put your fork down and breathe between bites.
• Notice taste satiety.
• Check back on your hunger level.
• Stop when you start to feel full.
Source: Duke Integrative Medicine
For more information on mindful eating
• "Mindless Eating" by Brian Wansink
• "Eating Mindfully" by Susan Albers
• "The Zen of Eating" by Ronna Kabatznick
It sounds so simple, but it takes discipline and practice. It's a far cry from the mindless way many of us eat while walking, working or watching TV, stopping only when the plate is clean or the show is over.
It's also a mind-blowing experience: I'm full and completely satisfied after three mindful bites.
The approach, which has roots in Buddhism, is being studied at several academic medical centers and the National Institutes of Health as a way to combat eating disorders. In a randomized controlled trial at Duke and Indiana State University, binge eaters who participated in a nine-week mindful-eating program went from binging an average of four times a week to once, and reduced their levels of insulin resistance, a precursor to diabetes. More NIH-funded trials are under way to study whether mindful eating is effective for weight loss, and for helping people who have lost weight keep it off.
One key aspect is to approach food nonjudgmentally. Many people bring a host of negative emotions to the table -- from guilt about blowing a diet to childhood fears of deprivation or wastefulness. "I joke with my clients that if I could put a microphone in their heads and broadcast what they're saying to themselves when they eat, the FCC would have to bleep it out," says Megrette Fletcher, executive director of the Center for Mindful Eating, a Web-based forum for health-care professionals. http://louisgjgsheehan.blogspot.com/
Using food as a reward or as solace also interferes with eating mindfully; if you're eating to satisfy emotional hunger, it's hard to ever feel full. "Ask yourself, what do you really need and what else can you do it fulfill it?" says Ms. Loring.
Have you had learned to eat consciously? Has it changed your life? If not, does it sound like something you'd like to try? Share your thoughts.
Chronic dieters in particular have trouble recognizing their internal cues, says Jean Kristeller, a psychologist at Indiana State, who pioneered mindful eating in the 1990s. "Diets set up rules around food and disconnect people even further from their own experiences of hunger and satiety and fullness," she says.
Mindful eaters learn to assess taste satiety. A hunger for something sweet or sour or salty can often be satisfied with a small morsel. In one exercise, Ms. Kristeller has clients mindfully eat a single raisin -- noticing their thoughts and emotions, as well as the taste and texture. "It sounds somewhat silly," she explains, "but it can also be very profound." http://louisijisheehan.blogspot.com/
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Mindful eating also means learning to ignore urges to snack that aren't connected to hunger. And it's critical to leave food on your plate once you are full; pack it to go, if possible.
In contrast to other diet programs, the researchers involved with mindful eating avoid making weight-loss claims; that's still being investigated. But some practitioners say it's life-changing.
"I don't think about food anymore. It's totally out of my mind," says Mary Ann Power, age 50, of Pittsboro, N.C., a lifelong dieter who thinks she's lost eight or 10 pounds in two weeks since learning the practice at Duke. "I think you could put a piece of chocolate cake in front of my nose right now, and it wouldn't tempt me. Before, I could eat three pieces."
One mindful meal at Duke made a big impression on me -- I was satisfied with minimal meals for days afterward. But it's hard to sustain. I find myself eating mindlessly again in front of the TV, or at the computer.
"Try to eat one meal or one snack mindfully every day," advises Jeffrey Greeson, a psychologist with the Duke program. "Even eating just the first few bites mindfully can help break the cycle of wolfing it down without paying any attention."
For thirteen centuries, between 1200 B.C. and the second century A.D., the Jews lived in, and often ruled, the land of Israel. The population was clustered mainly in Judaea, Samaria, and Galilee. The Jews’ dominion was long but not eternal. The Romans invaded and, after suppressing revolts in A.D. 66-73 and 132-135, killed or expelled much of the Jewish population and renamed the land Palaestina, for the Philistines who had lived along the southern seacoast. After the conquest, some Jews stayed behind, and the faith of the Hebrews remained a religio licita, a tolerated religion, throughout the Roman Empire.
By the nineteenth century, Palestine had been ruled by Romans, Persians, Byzantines, Arabs, Christian Crusaders, and Ottoman Turks. When Mark Twain visited in 1867, his imagination soaked with the Biblical imagery of milk and honey, he discovered to his surprise “a hopeless, dreary, heartbroken land . . . desolate and unlovely.” Jericho was “accursed,” Jerusalem “a pauper village.” Twain’s passages on Palestine in “The Innocents Abroad” have, over the decades, been exploited by propagandists to echo Lord Shaftesbury’s notion that, before the return of the Jews to Zion, Palestine was a land without a people for a people without a land. Twain and Shaftesbury, as it turned out, were hardly alone in failing to recognize a substantial Arab population in the Judaean hills and beyond. http://louisjjjsheehan.blogspot.com/
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And yet nineteenth-century Palestine certainly was desolate and impoverished. The population in 1881 consisted of four hundred and fifty thousand Palestinian Arabs and twenty-five thousand Jews, nearly all of them ultra-Orthodox non-nationalists living in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias. Palestine, despite its importance to the three monotheistic religions, was a political backwater. The Ottomans divided the land into sanjaks, or districts, which were ruled from Constantinople, Damascus, and Beirut. It was at this time, however, that European Jews—poor, mainly secular, and feeling the onset of an intensified anti-Semitism in their countries of origin—began to emigrate to Palestine. This was the First Aliyah, or ascent. Most European Jewish emigrants headed to North America and Great Britain, but some, in small numbers at first, sailed to Palestine. The local Ottoman bureaucrats were strapped for cash, and the new arrivals had little problem obtaining entry rights, agricultural plots, and building permits. This was colonialism not by conquering armies but by persistent real-estate transactions—and, when necessary, baksheesh.
The plans of the early Jewish settlers were unambiguous, even if they seemed, at the time, wholly incredible. As one early Zionist, Ze’ev Dubnow, wrote to his brother Simon, “The ultimate goal . . . is, in time, to take over the Land of Israel and to restore to the Jews the political independence they have been deprived of for these two thousand years. . . . The Jews will yet arise and, arms in hand (if need be), declare that they are the masters of their ancient homeland.”
In the midst of this first wave of immigration, Zionism found its chief tribune, dreamer, and theorist in Theodor Herzl. A mediocre playwright and the Paris correspondent for a liberal Viennese daily newspaper, Neue Freie Presse, Herzl witnessed the Dreyfus trial in 1894 and the appalling anti-Jewish demonstrations that followed. In the four-volume “History of Anti-Semitism,” Léon Poliakov writes that in the last decades before the First World War it was “hard to determine whether the French Jews or the German Jews were the more fervently patriotic.” But Herzl concluded that if anti-Semitism was as pervasive in the capitals of the European Enlightenment as it was in tsarist Russia there was no hope for assimilation. He was thoroughly secular and had no real Jewish learning. He spoke neither Yiddish nor Hebrew. (Indeed, the pathos of his conversion to Zionism lay in his devotion both to Vienna and to German culture, and in the degree to which events in Europe would, with the rise of the Third Reich, surpass his darkest predictions.)
When Herzl published “Der Judenstaat” (“The Jewish State”), in 1896, the book seemed to most readers as utopian as Bacon’s “New Atlantis.” As portrayed in Amos Elon’s wonderful 1975 biography, Herzl was an almost comically quixotic figure—the bearded café intellectual with his historical dreams travelling the world, trying (and failing) to win financial support from the Rothschilds and political support from the Kaiser and the Ottoman sultan. And yet the Zionist movement, with Herzl at its center, took hold, and in 1897, at the First Zionist Congress, in Basel, Switzerland, a motley collection of Jewish intellectuals and political activists voted to establish a Heimstätte, a “publicly and legally secured home,” for the Jews in Palestine.
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Although the delegates surely had a sovereign state in mind, they were careful in these early days not to use such terms, so as not to alarm the Gentiles or offend any Jewish grandees who might eventually decide to fund their project.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Palestinian Arabs identified themselves not as a unified people but as subjects of the Ottoman Empire and of the greater community of Islam; their local identities were tied to their villages, clans, and families. Resistance to the earliest wave of Jewish immigration was apparent, but it was polite compared to what came later. In 1899, the mayor of Jerusalem, Yusuf Dia al-Khalidi, wrote to Zadok Kahn, the chief rabbi of France, saying that the Zionist idea was in theory “natural, fine, and just. . . . Who can challenge the rights of the Jews to Palestine? Good lord, historically it is really your country.” But, like other Palestinian notables, he opposed Jewish immigration, because the land was inhabited and resistance would inevitably follow. “In the name of God, let Palestine be left in peace,” Khalidi wrote. Rabbi Kahn passed the letter on to Herzl, who blithely wrote to Khalidi to reassure him that the Zionists, with their wealth, their skills, and their education, would build an economy to benefit both Arab and Jew.
As the flow of immigration increased, so did the resistance, especially with the end of the First World War and the beginning of British control over Palestine, in 1917-18, and culminating in the 1936-39 Arab revolt against the Yishuv, the name for the pre-state Jewish community. The resistance took the form of demonstrations (some of them virulently anti-Semitic), riots, assaults, and bombings. The Palestinian leadership became more and more radicalized, and small clandestine groups were formed. In turn, radical Jewish factions and militias began to win support.
Where the Arabs were concerned, Herzl had been more oblivious than cruel. But the leader of the Yishuv, David Ben-Gurion, recognized the us-or-them nature of the conflict; he sensed the emotional force of his adversary’s position even as he fought for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. Between 1931 and 1939, as Jewish emigration mounted, the Arab majority declined from eighty-two per cent to seventy per cent. “What Arab cannot do his math and understand that immigration at the rate of sixty thousand a year means a Jewish state in all of Palestine?” Ben-Gurion stated. As he confessed years later to the Zionist Nahum Goldmann, “Why should the Arabs make peace? . . . We have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it’s true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them?”
Among Arab clerics, kings, and diplomats, the view of the Jews hardened into a maximalist politics, at once threatened and threatening. In 1943, when Franklin Roosevelt sent out feelers to King Ibn Sa’ud of Saudi Arabia to solve the Palestine situation, the King responded that he was “prepared to receive anyone of any religion except (repeat except) a Jew.” In a letter to F.D.R., he wrote, “Palestine . . . has been an Arab country since the dawn of history and . . . was never inhabited by the Jews for more than a period of time, during which their history in the land was full of murder and cruelty.” In 1947, Jordan’s prime minister, Samir Rifa’i, hardly the most radical politician in the region, told reporters, “The Jews are a people to be feared. . . . Give them another twenty-five years and they will be all over the Middle East, in our country and Syria and Lebanon, in Iraq and Egypt. . . . They were responsible for starting two world wars. . . . Yes, I have read and studied, and I know they were behind Hitler at the beginning of his movement.”
What followed was a drama of redemptive, liberating settlement on one side and catastrophic dispossession on the other—all of it taking place on a patch of desert land too small for easy division and too imbued with historical and holy claims for rational negotiation. For the Jews in Palestine, Zionism was a movement of national liberation after untold suffering; for the Arabs, Zionism was an intolerable assault by the colonial West against sacred ground and Islam itself. Even now, more than a century later, politicians and scholars alike quickly betray prejudices, passions, and allegiances in the details they select when relating the saga that led to the U.N. Partition Plan, on November 29, 1947, and the war that began just hours later.
In Soviet-era Russia, honest young men and women of academic inclination knew never to enter the field of modern history. In order to live a scholarly life relatively free of cant and suppression, one studied Byzantine manuscripts, Mayan civilization, medieval Burma—anything that would safely skirt mention of one’s own time and place. In the new society of Israel, however noisily democratic, national history is inescapably political, too. And, like any young nation, especially one born of conflict, Israel did not readily accept scholarly work that challenged its most cherished national myths. Self-doubt, complexity, and reflection are not the modes of infancy; in any country, mythmaking precedes documentary rigor. For nearly forty years, Israeli histories and textbooks, with few exceptions, endorsed the notion that the more than seven hundred thousand Arabs who left Palestine as refugees in the years between 1947 and 1950 did so voluntarily or at the urging of their leaders. http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.blogspot.com/
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This was a view echoed abroad by Leon Uris in his fantastically popular novel “Exodus”; Uris writes of “the absolutely documented fact that the Arab leaders wanted the civilian population to leave Palestine as a political issue and a military weapon.”
In the late eighties, Israel encountered its first revisionist historians, a group of rigorous young scholars intent on seeing clearly the founding and development of the state, come what may. At the head of that small and diverse movement was Benny Morris, a Sabra and a Cambridge-educated leftist, who, like Israel itself, was born in 1948. His latest book on that pivotal year of war and transformation, “1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War” (Yale; $32.50), is a commanding, superbly documented, and fair-minded study of the events that, in the wake of the Holocaust, gave a sovereign home to one people and dispossessed another. Remarkably, the book makes every attempt at depth and balance, even though its author has professed a “cosmic pessimism” about the current situation in the Middle East and has denounced the Palestinian leadership in the harshest terms imaginable.
Benny Morris’s family emigrated from Britain in 1947, and Morris grew up in the heart of a left-wing pioneering atmosphere. As an infant, he lived on Kibbutz Yasur, which had been established in 1949 on the ruins of the Arab village of Al Birwa, where the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish lived before going into exile. His father, Ya’akov Morris, was an Israeli diplomat and a published historian and poet.
In 1982, Morris experienced Mena-chem Begin and Ariel Sharon’s invasion of southern Lebanon, first as a correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, then as a soldier, when his division was called up and took part in the siege in West Beirut. As a reporter, he visited Rashidiye, a Palestinian refugee camp near Tyre, and interviewed refugees who had lived in the town of Al Bassa, in Galilee. When Morris returned home, he examined newly declassified papers in the Israel State Archive, along with documents in archives in the U.S. and Britain and at the United Nations. (Arab governments have made available very little archival material on the period.) His subject was the military conflict between the early Zionists and the Arabs and the subsequent exile of the Palestinians from their cities and towns.
In 1988, Morris published “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949,” which revolutionized Israeli historiography and, to a great extent, a nation’s understanding of its own birth. Relying less on testimony than on the newly available documents, Morris described how and why sixty per cent of the Palestinians were uprooted and their society destroyed. It was a far more complex picture than many Israelis were prepared to accept. The book features a map that shows three hundred and eighty-nine Arab villages, from upper Galilee to the Negev Desert. Morris revealed that in forty-nine of these villages the indigenous Arabs were expelled by the Haganah and other Jewish military forces; in sixty-two villages, the Arabs fled out of fear, having heard rumors of attacks and even massacres; in six, the villagers left at the instruction of Palestinian local leaders. The refugees, who probably expected to return to their homes in a matter of weeks or months, went to Gaza and the West Bank, and also to surrounding Arab countries—Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, and Syria—where, to this day, they have never been fully absorbed.
Morris’s aim was not simply to invert the standard Zionist narrative. He provided a stark picture of the anti-Semitism that infected the Arab leadership, including the influential mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Muhammad Amin al-Husseini, who refused any compromise with the Zionists and, in the forties, promoted anti-Jewish propaganda from Berlin and recruited Bosnian Muslims for the S.S. Morris quoted the many leaders among the Palestinians and the Arab countries who vowed to eliminate the nascent state of Israel and force the European Jewish arrivals back to where they came from. But he also wrote at length about acts of wartime cruelty committed by the Jewish victors against the Palestinians. He counted about a dozen documented cases of Israelis raping Palestinian women but concluded that more likely went unrecorded. He said that there were about two dozen acts of massacre, some involving four or five executions but others involving many more, at Saliha, Deir Yassin, Lydda, and Dawayima. http://louis3j3sheehan.blogspot.com/
Morris wrote that, although the leader of the Jewish forces, David Ben-Gurion, did not give explicit orders to expel Palestinians from their villages and urban neighborhoods, he was, from April, 1948, onward, projecting a message of transfer, an “atmosphere” in which, for example, a young commander, Yitzhak Rabin, could sign an order to expel the Arabs from Lydda just after receiving a visit from Ben-Gurion. “He understood there could be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in its midst,” Morris has said.
“The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949” was the most important text in that first wave of Israeli revisionism. (Other “new historians,” as Morris dubbed his generation of like-minded scholars, included Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim, and Tom Segev.) The book was published at the height of the first intifada, a Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip led by young people throwing stones at Israeli troops. Morris supported the intifada as a legitimate expression of outrage against the occupation. When his Army unit was called up for service in the West Bank city of Nablus, he refused to go and spent three weeks in jail.
Morris went unrewarded for his independence. Although his book received serious attention in Israel and abroad, he could not get a university job. In 1996, he announced in the press that he planned to leave the country. http://louis4j4sheehan4esquire.blogspot.com/
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When the interview was published, Ezer Weizman, a key military figure in the 1948 war and the President of Israel, summoned Morris to his office and asked if he supported Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. Morris, who considered himself a liberal Zionist, said that he did. Weizman called the president of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in Be’er Sheva, and, a year later, after passing through the usual academic checkpoints, Morris began his career there as a professor of history.
Between 1993 and 1998, amid the optimism of the Oslo Accords and the possibility that the century-long conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinian Arabs might be coming to a negotiated end, Morris worked on a comprehensive survey of the confrontation. The title, “Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001,” attests to the book’s historical and imaginative sympathy both for the Zionists, who acquired a homeland but never a sense of security, and for the Palestinians, whose demand for a homeland remained unsatisfied. Like all Morris’s work, the book does not pretend to some sort of absolute objectivity—he has been attacked from every side over the years—but its attempt at balance is obvious: where there is anti-Arab racism among the Zionist forefathers, it is quoted; where there is venality among the early Palestinian leadership, it, too, is pointed out. The epitaph to “Righteous Victims” is the famous passage from Auden’s “September 1, 1939” that speaks to the degrading costs of war and persecution: “I and the public know / What all schoolchildren learn, / Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.”
But, just as the Arab world’s rejection of the 1947 partition plan pushed Israeli leaders toward an even harsher view of their adversaries, Yasir Arafat’s rejection of the peace proposals proffered by Ehud Barak in 2000 at Camp David and at Taba, Egypt, coupled with the second intifada, which followed, disillusioned Benny Morris to the point of embitterment.
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Morris, who has always voted for parties on the left, said that Arafat had “defrauded” the Israelis, and he decided that the Palestinians had no intention of forging a compromise. Morris was not at all persuaded by explanations and press reports claiming that Clinton and Barak had offered Arafat an unfair, hastily prepared deal. Even if Israel returned to its pre-1967 borders, Morris concluded, the Palestinians would consider that only a step in a “phased plan” to eliminate a “crusader state” from sacred Arab lands. After 2000, he said in a 2004 interview with Ha’aretz, “I understood that they were unwilling to accept the two-state solution. They want it all. Lod and Acre and Jaffa.” Morris did criticize the Israeli government for continuing to build on occupied territory, but, especially in his role as pundit and polemicist, he was no longer giving equal weight to two “righteous victims.”
In the Ha’aretz interview, Morris took a tone that was in scant evidence in his earlier journalism or scholarly work. He spoke of a “deep problem in Islam,” of a world in which “life doesn’t have the same value it does in the West.” The Arabs belonged to a “tribal culture” in which “revenge” played a “central part,” a society so lacking in “moral inhibitions” that “if it obtains chemical or biological or atomic weapons, it will use them.”
Morris was hardly the only Israeli liberal dispirited by Arafat’s behavior in 2000 and the suicide bombs and re-occupations that followed; nor was he alone in his gloom after September 11th. But his new language came as a shock. He described the Arab world as “barbarian,” and said that the Israeli massacres committed in 1947-48 were “peanuts” compared with those in Bosnia. Then, there was his call to build “something like a cage” for the Palestinians: “I know that sounds terrible. It is really cruel. But there is no other choice. There is a wild animal that has to be locked up in one way or another.” Upon reflection, even Morris was appalled by those words and later apologized.
To some extent, Morris has been writing the same book throughout his scholarly life, and one theme that has been pronounced is that of “transfer.” In all his work, he has explored the thorny question of whether or not Ben-Gurion and his colleagues explicitly endorsed a policy of “transferring”—exiling—the Arab population from Israel.
By the time of the 2004 Ha’aretz interview, Morris had adopted a harsher, more prescriptive tone that was sometimes chilling to the liberal audience that had first welcomed him. Fearing the loss of a Jewish majority and the rise of an Arab fifth column, some right-wing politicians have advocated transferring either the Palestinian Arabs or the Israeli Arabs, or both, to Jordan—a country they refer to as the true Palestinian state. (That was once a theme of Ariel Sharon’s.) Although Morris does not endorse such a policy—“It is neither moral nor realistic”—he does say that, historically speaking, BenGurion “faltered” in 1948. “If he was already engaged in expulsion, maybe he should have done a complete job,” he told Ha’aretz. “I know that this stuns the Arabs and the liberals and the politically correct types. But my feeling is that this place would be quieter and know less suffering if the matter had been resolved once and for all.” Morris acknowledged that ethnic cleansing was “problematic” but later pointed out catastrophic situations in which it could be “beneficial for humanity.” He cited the Turkish expulsion of the Greek minority, Greece’s expulsion of its Turkish minority after the First World War, and the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia after the Second World War. http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.blogspot.com/
(His sanguine perspective is unlikely to have been shared by, say, the German survivors of the Brünner Todesmarsch, the Brno death march.)
Four years ago, Morris said that only “apocalyptic” circumstances would demand that Israel carry out a policy of transfer. By January, 2007, writing in the Jerusalem Post, he seemed convinced that apocalypse was around the corner. The United States has been driven to isolationism by its “debacle” in Iraq, Russia and China are “obsessed with Muslim markets,” and Israel, led by a “party hack of a prime minister,” who botched the war with Hezbollah in 2006, will now be “like a rabbit caught in the headlights” as Iran prepares to launch nuclear-tipped Shihab missiles at Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Be’er Sheva. In this scenario, which Morris implied is nearly inevitable, the Israeli leadership knows that it cannot launch a unilateral attack on Iran, for fear of igniting a “world-embracing” terror campaign:
So Israel’s leaders will grit their teeth and hope that somehow things will turn out for the best. Perhaps, after acquiring the Bomb, the Iranians will behave “rationally”?
But the Iranians are driven by a higher logic. And they will launch their rockets. And, as with the first Holocaust, the international community will do nothing. It will all be over, for Israel, in a few minutes—not like in the 1940s, when the world had five long years in which to wring its hands and do nothing.
What is so striking about Morris’s work as a historian is that it does not flatter anyone’s prejudices, least of all his own. The stridency and darkness of some of his public pronouncements is not a feature of “Righteous Victims,” which is the most useful survey of the conflict, or of “1948,” which is the best history of the first Arab-Israeli wars. In “1948,” the assembled compendium of aspiration, folly, aggression, hypocrisy, deception, bigotry, violence, suffering, and achievement is so comprehensive and multilayered that no reader can emerge without a feeling of unease—which is to say, a sense of the moral and historical intricacy of the conflict.
One of the lingering mythologies that Morris set out to confront in “1948” is the iconography of strength and weakness, the competition between Jews and Palestinians for the role of underdog and chief victim. There were two wars following the U.N. partition resolution: first, the immediate Palestinian uprising against the Yishuv, and then, after the Palestinian defeat, the coördinated invasion by the armies of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Jordan. Morris concludes that the Arabs were demographically and geopolitically stronger—the Palestinians outnumbered the Jews of the Yishuv two to one, and the surrounding Arab states had a population, all told, of forty million. But in the years leading to the war the Yishuv had organized political and military institutions that were suited to crisis. Troop call-ups, expert foreign military personnel, and weapons-procurement systems were in place. By contrast, very few Palestinians came from the Hebron, Ramallah, and Nablus areas to aid their fellow Palestinian Arabs in Jaffa, Haifa, Jerusalem, and the Jezreel and Jordan Valleys. “The Yishuv had fought not a ‘people,’ ” Morris concludes, “but an assortment of regions, towns, and villages.” http://louis9j9sheehan9esquire.blogspot.com/
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http://louis-j-sheehan.de/When the four Arab armies invaded, on May 15, 1948, they, too, were disorganized and—compared with the Jews, who were fighting for their survival—far less motivated.
About six thousand Jews and twelve thousand Palestinians died in the conflict; the Egyptians lost fourteen hundred men; the Iraqis, Jordanians, and Syrians lost several hundred each. Not long afterward, seven hundred thousand Palestinians were exiled from their homes, and the Jewish minorities in the Islamic world—in Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Iran, Yemen, and Libya—experienced anti-Semitic demonstrations, pogroms, threats, internments, bomb attacks, synagogue fires. This, too, was a product of the war, and half a million Jews, the Sephardim, eventually left Islamic countries for Israel and, largely because of the circumstances of their exile, formed the Likud rank and file.
In his closing pages, Morris writes with rueful understanding and keen judgment of the consequences of his subject, the rise of a state that gave him a home while displacing so many others:
The war was a humiliation from which that world has yet to recover—the antithesis of the glory days of Arab Islamic dominance of the Middle East and the eastern and southern Mediterranean basins. The sense of humiliation only deepened over the succeeding sixty years as Israel visibly grew and prospered while repeatedly beating the Arabs in new wars, as the Palestinian refugee camps burst at the seams while sinking in the mire of international charity and terrorism, and as the Arab world shuttled between culturally self-effacing Westernization and religious fundamentalism.
Next month, the Israelis mark the sixtieth anniversary of their independence, the Palestinians the sixtieth anniversary of al-nakba, the catastrophe.
The history of the cocaine trade between Andean countries and the United States over the past 30 years shows that no sooner have police and customs officials become adept at spotting one smuggling method than the drug-traffickers come up with a new one. Light planes and commercial flights gave way to shipping containers. Where once cocaine was hidden in shipments of fresh vegetables and flowers, more recently it has been found in specially moulded furniture and concrete fencing posts.
But the latest method is especially cunning: home-made submarines. These first appeared a decade ago, but were considered by officials to be an oddity. Now it seems the traffickers have perfected the design and manufacture of semi-submersible craft (although they look like submarines, they don't fully submerge). In 2006, American officials say they detected only three; now they are spotting an average of ten a month.
Of those, only one in ten is intercepted. Many sail up the Pacific coast, often far out to sea. With enough cargo space to carry two to five tonnes of cocaine, they also carry large fuel tanks, giving them a range of 2,000 miles (3,200km). They are typically made of fibreglass, powered by a 300/350hp diesel engine and manned by a crew of four. http://louis8j8sheehan8.blogspot.com/
They normally unload their cargo onto fast power boats for the final leg to shore. None has been sighted unloading at ports or beaches.
One theory is that the switch to submarines is part of an effort by Colombian cocaine producers to win back from their Mexican rivals-cum-partners a bigger slice of the profits from drugs. In the 1990s most cocaine began to enter the United States across its southern land border, rather than across the Caribbean. That allowed Mexican gangs to oust Colombians from much of the lucrative retail-distribution business in American cities.
The latest innovation may mean that a claimed increase in the retail price of cocaine (up 44% between January and September according to the United States' Drug Enforcement Administration) could prove short-lived. The price rise may have stemmed from a crackdown by Mexico on its drug gangs, which has prompted murderous feuding between them. But many independent analysts reckon that cocaine consumption in the United States has remained more or less constant. John Walsh, of the Washington Office on Latin America, an NGO, says that four similar price increases in the 1980s and 1990s were quickly reversed.
Interdiction of cocaine shipments fell by 20% last year. Stopping the subs requires “wide-area surveillance systems, acoustics and better intelligence,” says Admiral James Stavridis, the head of the United States' Southern Command, based in Miami. Having shot drug planes out of the sky, and used army troops to destroy coca fields and laboratories, it seems that the drug warriors will have to move into anti-submarine warfare.
A disease that carries with it a social stigma causes additional and unnecessary suffering. This has often been so with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), or chronic-fatigue syndrome, as it is also known. Despite debilitating symptoms, patients have been accused of suffering from an imaginary illness: “yuppie flu”. Doctors have struggled to distinguish the ailing from the malingering. Nonetheless, evidence has grown in recent years that the syndrome is real, and now there is news that it has its roots in genetics.
ME manifests as extreme exhaustion, something that may include a range of other symptoms, such as disturbed sleep, difficulties in remembering and concentrating, headaches, and painful muscles and joints. Psychological symptoms, such as anxiety and irritability, can also be present. As the symptoms can vary in severity, the syndrome can be hard to identify, and patients can suffer for months before a diagnosis is made.
However, new hope for ME sufferers arrived this week at a conference in Cambridge, in Britain. The event, organised by ME Research UK and the Irish ME Trust, two charities that help to fund studies and assist sufferers, was attended by researchers investigating what causes the illness and how it could be treated.
Jonathan Kerr of St George's University of London told the meeting that with his colleagues they have identified 88 genes which are expressed differently in the blood of patients who had been diagnosed with ME. http://louis3j3sheehan3.blogspot.com/
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Moreover, in studying the records of 55 patients with ME, they found that they could divide them into seven separate sub-types that consistently pair distinct genetic patterns with a combination and severity of patients' symptoms. This, says Dr Kerr, points to a biological basis for the illness and holds out hope that a blood test could be developed to identify its different forms. His group are now trying to find the biological markers that such a blood test would need to detect.
ME, myself, why?
One tactic for dealing with ME is to treat its symptoms with drugs that are already used against other diseases. Patients with some of the severest symptoms suffer from low blood pressure and have difficulty regulating their heartbeat. Julia Newton, of Newcastle University in Britain, says this is because of problems with their autonomic nervous systems, which is responsible for subconscious activities. In studies using a magnetic-resonance imaging scanner, she found a build-up of acid in the muscles of ME patients when they took exercise. This can cause muscle weakness and pain. Dr Newton believes the build-up could be influenced entirely, or at least in part, by the degree to which the autonomic nervous system fails to properly maintain blood flow. It could also mean that drugs that already exist to help improve blood flow might also help some ME patients.
But what triggers ME? Some estimates put its occurrence at around one in 200 people in America and Britain. Sufferers are often in their 20s and 30s, and more women are affected than men. That it is so widespread suggests to some researchers that there are many causes, including exposure to certain viruses and other infectious diseases.
A long period of fatigue after suffering from an infectious disease is not unusual. At the conference, a team of Australian researchers speculated that many cases of ME are in fact cases of “post-infectious chronic fatigue”. Stephen Graves, of the Australian Rickettsial Reference Laboratory, said they had found a proportion of Australian ME sufferers may have a genetic predisposition to developing ME as a result of exposure to Q Fever or Flinders Island Spotted Fever. These are a pair of relatively uncommon diseases caused by two bacteria which can pass between animals and humans. If their hypothesis is correct, Dr Graves believes the incidence of ME in Australia may be reduced by greater public-health measures.
Although the trigger for most cases of ME may remain a mystery, the discovery of its biological roots and the promise of a test will bring hope of a diagnosis to sufferers. And, perhaps, inspire a sudden recovery in the malingerers.
http://www.soundboard.com/sb/UFO_Edward_Air_Force_Base.aspx
Up to twelve luminous UFOs flew over this secure test facility and the region, and at least one F-106A interceptor was scrambled from George AFB at Victorville. All of this action was captured on classified U.S. Air Force audio tapes which have now been declassified and are available to the public along with official documentation.The question in my mind is, what was going on during those 3-4 hours we don't know about? If we were allowed to hear only 6 hours of 40, and read only 17 pages of hard-to-read documents, what is it we were NOT allowed to hear and see? The documents we have make it clear that by the time Alpha Lima Zero One was scrambled at at 1209Z or 5:09 PM PDT, "the activity was just about over." http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.blogspot.com/
Major Struble from an outfit known as LAADS (Los Angeles Air Defense Sector), a division of ARADCOM (Army Air Defense Command) authorized the making of these recordings of voice transmissions made by military personnel to and from Edwards Air Force Base- from base to base communications, phone patches, ground to air radio & tower to air radio. These recordings archived the conversations which documented this event of UFO visitation of a highly secure military base. The audio recordings were made on an extra track of large reels of radar data tapes, which were running all the time in the case of an accident and the need to review the radar tracks.
The event at Edwards Air Force Base took place over about a five hour period and since the voice recordings were made from at least 8 positions, approximately 40 hours of audio recordings had to have been made. Out of the possible 40 hours of these tape recordings only 6 hours were declassified by the Department of the Air Force.
Darryl Clark, Capt. 329th Fighter Interceptor Squadron (FIS), George AFB, Calif., was an alert pilot with Detachment.1 at Edwards AFB. He happened to be on duty this evening and was called upon to observe the activity. His observations were all made from the ground. Captain Clark was one of the important Alert Pilots at Edwards Air Force Base on the night of October 7, 1965. He was entrusted with flying one of the Hot Birds, as planes loaded with Nuclear Weapons were called, that protected the western part of the United States. http://louis2j2sheehan2esquire2.blogspot.com/
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Skilled at target identification, Captain Clark is heard on the original Air Force recordings describing his UFO sighting of that night. (See Darryl Clark actual statement below)
That evening, October 7 (and the following one, October 8), 1965, some 700 engineers and scientists attended the Fourth X-15 Technical Conference at the (then) NASA Flight Research Center at Edwards AFB. This dealt with the research results of the 150 some X-15 flights made since 1959. (Astronautics and Aeronautics 1965 NASA SP-4006, page 464 - Joel Carpenter)
I am a film producer who is a product of the 1950s: the Saucer Scares, the Cold War, and the beginning of the U.S. Government's official denial of ET visitation of Planet Earth. I guess I have always thought our world was being visited by intelligent beings from elsewhere. When I had a UFO sighting in 1961 and was ridiculed for trying to discuss it, I became determinued to probe and study the UFO issue for as long as it took to discover the truth.
As a logical outcome of that longterm goal, I spent years researching and collating data in preparation of the production of a major film documentary on the UFO/ET issue. I finally got to the point of starting production in 1992. However, so strong is our programmed cultural and political denial of ET visitation that even members of my own staff treated me as an object of derision. This only made me more determined than ever to solve the UFO enigma, and I then began going straight to the very institutions which were witholding the truth from us: our own Military and Space agencies. My goal was to somehow obtain legitimate hard data from them that would be virtually impossible to debunk.
Back on the night of October 7, 1965, an event of historic proportions, a true landmark in UFO history, took place - the actual incursion over Edwards Air Force Base in the Palmdale/Lancaster area of California's Mojave Desert of a number of extraterrestrial craft. If this astonishing event is now, finally, gaining any measurable attention, it is a direct result of my efforts. I make that statement in all humility...it is simply the truth. In fact, this unprecedented event is not to be found in any of the major UFO books, and with the exception of a few UFO magazines reviewing my work, and interviews done with me on programs like Jeff Rense's SIGHTINGS, this event still remains virtually unknown.
What makes this historic intrusion and visit so important is that the US Air Force thoroughly documented it and even gave it a code name: "The Incident." During that fall night in 1965, it seems that 12 luminous UFOs came right down low and just over a secure military runway. These craft were all sighted visually by Air Force personnel and by several types of radar. Further, the Air Force scrambled several jet fighters after them and during the event the possible use of nuclear weapons even became an issue. The entire incident was additionally documented with written reports, radar photos, and AUDIO TAPES made by Air Force personnel while they were actually SEEING the objects, FLYING AFTER the objects, and considering taking SERIOUS MILITARY ACTION against what they might imply as a threat. http://louis5j5sheehan5.blogspot.com/
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From my calculations at least 40 hours of recordings were made (a five hour event recording from at least 8 locations). However, only six hours of tapes were de-classified many years ago as a mass of noise and unclear voices, which truly defied interpretation. They had SCRAMBLED the tapes into what they felt was a hopeless jumble of random pieces of conversation utterly out of sequence and logical progression. When I realized what had been done, it presented a challenge which made me determined to find out what was hidden within that chaotic mass of sound.
After many months and countless hours of laborious research, cataloging, and editing the snips and pieces of the audio tape, I was able to organize the sound so the conversations could be understood. I had successfully restored the tapes to their original and correct sequencing. I then added carefully researched narration, which explained what was taking place, so that the listener would clearly understand the unfolding event.
As narrator, I sought out Jackson Beck, the true dean of radio announcers and films commentators - the voice of the Paramount Newsreel, countless original Military films, and even the original narrator of the Superman radio program. Mr. Beck is now heard on many important new national radio and TV commercials. His voice is known to millions, even if his name is not. I felt he would add credibility to the narration of this astonishing historical event. In fact, he told me that he has made a life long study of the UFO field and has had several important sightings himself.
The resulting reconstructed tapes are now ironclad documented proof of the existence of extraterrestrial UFO visitation to this planet. I have sent copies of my finished product directly to a number of major Government Agencies and have received NO NEGATIVE COMMENTS! Not a single Official Agency has tried to debunk or discredit the event, or my presentation of the tapes.
Furthermore, The CSETI organization has used my tape presentation in meetings with members of Congress with the aim of having our government tell the public the truth of ET involvement on the Earth. TSgt Charles Sorrels, heard prominently on the original Edwards recordings of October 7, 1965, and in newly-produced segments confirming the event, made the presentation in Washington which featured my documentary version of the Edwards Tapes. And yes, the plane spotters at Edwards KNEW that UFOs or UFOBs, as they called them then, were not our "black" projects, Soviet bombers, or any known aircraft - they were unknown, fabulously high-tech craft with capabilities beyond any known technology. And..as they said on the old Superman series: "far beyond that of Mortal Man!"
In 1961 I saw and photographed an illuminated domed disc over New York City. I was treated with ridicule then and didn't like it. I had three other witnesses to this event. I planned to do a UFO documentary in the 1960's on this subject and use some of the stills and motion picture footage photographed.
At the time I was more interested in going to LA to make dramatic films, which I did. I came back to my old project in 1992. I had to endure the slings and arrows of ridicule from friends, and even business associates working on this film, now called Beyond This Earth.
I decided that I needed hard evidence that the subject was a real one, especially evidence from government agencies (which would add credibility if they had any connection to this subject).
From December 1992 to about June 1994 we filmed interviews, staged reenactments, obtained unique UFO footage, and even sent up a plane to chase and film UFOs from the air. (The plane succeeded in its mission, but that is another story.)
Having that success, I felt we were on a roll and more real events would take place which we would cover, but they did not. Not knowing if what we filmed in Northern California posed a threat to the public, I felt we should make an official report on it. Which we did. http://louis7j7sheehan.blogspot.com/
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This led to the suggestion that we go to various government agencies through the Freedom of Information Act and otherwise.
This has been a long, tedious process because we found out that we could classify the people we were in contact with into three categories, regarding the UFO phenomenon:
1. They knew nothing and couldn't help at all.
2. They knew nothing but wanted to help and were pro-release and moved us along.
3. They knew something and didn't want to help or encourage us.
Even still, we obtained the following de-classified materials, related to the UFO subject: Over 4000 pages of paper documents and correspondence; still photographs, radar photos, motion picture film, videotapes and audio tapes. Audio tapes?? Who was interested in that? We all wanted to see something.
Well, it turned out that the sounds presented some fantastic images all their own. I reviewed the audio materials last, as I had shelved them for months, I wanted visuals. What a mistake! I listened to six hours of confusing audio recordings from Edwards Air Force Base from the night of October 7, 1965 in which it sounded like a UFO alert was taking place over the base with 12 strange luminous objects coming down over the runway of one of our nation's most secure test facilities. This was/is the place where they fly the black, classified projects. They know what they are and what planes, helicopters, stars, weather balloons, planets and satellites are.
So what were they getting excited about? It was difficult to tell on the six hours of tapes. These tapes were de-classified, but in a form called "scrambled release" - all chopped up out of sequence, so they made no sense at all. I knew there was a story in there somewhere.
Between the chopped up editing and the overlay of noise, something very important lay in waiting. I decided to analyze the tapes for possible use in a segment in Beyond This Earth.
I took eight months in my own audio studio editing 1/4 inch audio tapes, after signal processing them in computer to remove noise. I got to know the tapes so well, I felt I almost knew the people on the tapes, which I would in time.
Now, what were these tapes and why were they made? In 1965 the Air Force ran large reels of recording tapes which recorded all of the signals from Radar. http://louis5j5sheehan.blogspot.com/
Then if an accident or problem took place, the Radar could be re-played like running a video tape to figure out what took place. In the case of special events a track on these radar tapes could be used to record voice transmissions at the air base.
This included all Phone Patches, Base-to-Base Communications and Ground- or Tower-to-Air Radio. Now this is what took place on the night of October 7, 1965 at Edwards Air Force Base. By putting the tapes into chronology and doing further research the story emerged.
At approximately 12:30AM, the Tower Operator at Edwards (a/k/a Edwards Tower) - Tech Sgt. Charles "Chuck" Sorrels saw a group of luminous objects flashing red, white, and blue or green light coming over the field. His job as an air traffic controller taught him to be watchful, so he could identify incoming planes. when these objects started to do unusual maneuvers, he knew this was out of the ordinary and called the Air Defense Command - in this case a unit known as LAADS (The Los Angeles Air Defense Sector).
Major Struble at LAADS ordered the recordings to be made--now we hear all this taking place on the actual tapes. He involved NORAD and the following other air bases- NORTON, HAMILTON, GEORGE and MARCH.
The major wanted to send planes up after the objects but could not do this until a CAPTAIN at Edwards approved sending up the planes. This Captain was the . . . get this . . . UFO officer (pronounced Yoo-fo) officer in charge on the base.
This was apparently more than just a job classification for reporting sightings, but he had to request the plane or planes go up, from the 28th Air Division at Hamilton, or they would not go up. In short the Air Defense Command needed HIS authority.
Well, here we are: the UFO subject, which we have heard does not exist, has its own UFO officers . . . how strange.
There were no officers on base for the other paranormal pursuits - Demon Officers, Ghost Officers or Leprechaun Officers. http://louis4j4sheehan.blogspot.com/
Once I started editing the tapes into some kind of sequence, everybody wanted to hear them. I then started making some cassettes as samples, and everybody wanted them. I gave many away and was encouraged to go further with my research. I did.
I found Chuck Sorrels, who authenticated the event and recorded an audio interview for my tape verifying the details.
I went to about a dozen military agencies, and they helped with the research. Eventually I put this together into a 54-minute audio documentary on audio cassette, along with a copy of Air Force written documentation, in a large vinyl display case and called the final program . . .
"THE EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE ENCOUNTER."
I have had great positive response to this work. Where I have made feature films for theatres for many years, and do have some fans, nothing I ever worked on yielded this response. Apparently many people, like myself, had been researching the UFO subject seriously, and were ridiculed by friends and family.
They, as I, needed some hard evidence to show/play for others, to gain new respect. I have been told that people are getting this tape, inviting their friends over and having a UFO party playing the tape to the amazement of all present.
That is what has been going on. The media caught onto this. I have been interviewed on numerous radio and TV programs on this subject and Paramount flew me out to California to appear in and work on a two-part "Sightings" episode on the Edwards tapes. We filmed in the Mojave Desert near Edwards AFB, where the original event took place.
They were very pleased with how it turned out and got good reaction to it. I have also sent copies of the documentary back to official agencies, with positive reaction, on a person-to-person basis.
I think many people want to get this UFO information out to the public. One well-known airline pilot, who is also a UFO investigator, sent me a nice letter when he finally got our tape and said: "When I first heard of your tape, I said to myself, who needs this? How wrong I was. This is solid evidence in a field where there is precious little (evidence)."
Since this has only been a side issue away from the production of my film, this tape is not yet available in stores, although we have had requests for it. Many people have contacted me who wanted to obtain it and said it was hard to find. So, we set up a mail order division to make the tape available, generally on short turn-around.
The tapes are guaranteed to be authentic. I am still researching the subject for a two-hour TV special on the same topic and an interactive CD-ROM on it. These programs will take this subject and broaden out the events of 10-7-65 and go forward and back in time. On the tapes the UFOs were spotted on Radar, Heightfinder Radar, Weather Radar and Visual Observations from many locations--ground, towers, tops of buildings, and planes. On the tapes we hear one F-106 pilot chasing a UFO up to 40,000 feet. However, my research shows that one plane may have crashed and a third plane also sent up. http://louis2j2sheehan.blogspot.com/
The six hours of tape I received, I believe to have been cut down from over 40 hours of original tapes . . . what could be on the rest of them?? I am seeking further research on this event and connecting events at Edwards and related bases.
I am also seeking to locate Major Struble, Captain John Balent (the UFO officer) and others involved with this event which was given a Code Name: "The Incident." http://louis1j1sheehan.blogspot.com/
There were some civilians near Edwards who also saw something and some stories in local papers, of which I would like to obtain copies. Many other events like this have taken place at other locations, but the information is . . . where?
For nine decades after Bolshevik executioners shot Czar Nicholas II and his family, there were no traces of the remains of Crown Prince Aleksei, the hemophiliac heir to Russia’s throne.
Some said the prince, a delicate 13-year-old, had somehow survived and escaped; others believed he was buried in secret as the country lurched into civil war.
Now an official says DNA tests have solved the mystery by identifying bone shards found in a forest as those of Aleksei and his sister Grand Duchess Maria.
The remains of their parents, Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra, and three siblings, including the czar’s youngest daughter, Anastasia, were unearthed in 1991 and reburied in the imperial resting place in St. Petersburg. The Russian Orthodox Church made all seven of them saints in 2000.
Researchers unearthed the bone shards last summer in a forest near Yekaterinburg, where the royal family was killed, and enlisted laboratories in Russia and the United States to conduct DNA tests.
Eduard Rossel, governor of the region 900 miles east of Moscow, said Wednesday that tests done by an American laboratory had identified the shards as those of Aleksei and Maria.
“This has confirmed that indeed it is the children,” he said. “We have now found the entire family.”
Mr. Rossel did not specify the laboratory, but a genetic research team working at the University of Massachusetts Medical School has been involved in the process. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com/Evgeny Rogaev, who headed the team that tested the remains in Moscow and at the medical school in Worcester, Mass., was called into the case by the Russian Federation Prosecutor’s Office.
He said Wednesday that he had delivered the results to the Russian authorities, but that it was up to the prosecutor’s office to disclose the findings.
“The most difficult work is done, and we have delivered to them our expert analysis, but we are still working,” he said. “Scientifically, we want to make the most complete investigation possible.” Despite the earlier discoveries and ceremonies, the absence of Aleksei’s and Maria’s remains gnawed at descendants of the Romanovs, history buffs and royalists. Even if the announcement is confirmed and widely accepted, many descendants of the royal family are unlikely to be fully assuaged; they seek formal rehabilitation by the government.
“The tragedy of the czar’s family will only end when the family is declared victims of political repression,” said German Lukyanov, a lawyer for royal descendants.
Nicholas abdicated in 1917 as revolutionary fervor swept Russia, and he and his family were detained. They were shot by a firing squad on July 17, 1918, in the basement of a house in Yekaterinburg.
In the introduction to his biography of Boris N. Yeltsin, Timothy J. Colton lists more than 100 of the similes and analogies that have been applied over the years to Yeltsin, among them martyr and jester, Lincoln and Nixon, Alexander the Great and Ivan the Terrible, Hamlet and Hercules, bear, bulldog and boa constrictor. The wry list is an early signal that Mr. Colton knows he is treading into a subject that has inspired rival mythologies.
To some Western academics and more than a few Russians, Yeltsin’s role was almost wholly destructive. Interrupting Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s cautious reforms of the Communist Party and the Soviet state, Yeltsin smashed both institutions. He sold off the country’s resource-rich industrial heritage to a few moguls in a corrupt insider auction. His economic “shock therapy” plunged the country into a period of falling output and runaway inflation that Mr. Colton likens to the Great Depression. He unleashed the army against a mutinous parliament and waged a brutal, scorched-earth war against separatist Chechnya. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/page1.aspx
For years after Yeltsin crashed onto the political scene, the Gorbachev-infatuated West was overwhelmingly dismissive. Mr. Colton, a professor of government and director of Russian studies at Harvard and the author of a grand history of the city of Moscow, cops to being one of those early dismissers. But he declares up front that his research brought him around to the view that Yeltsin, while flawed and enigmatic, was a hero.
“As a democratizer,” Mr. Colton writes, “he is in the company of Nelson Mandela, Lech Walesa, Mikhail Gorbachev and Vaclav Havel. It is his due even when allowance is made for his blind spots and mistakes.”
Mr. Colton is not the first to undertake Yeltsin’s redemption. Leon Aron’s “Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life” took up the case for Yeltsin in 2000, as his presidency was petering out, and his popularity was at a low ebb. But Mr. Colton has used the extra time to excellent effect. He has mined declassified Kremlin transcripts; fact-checked many memoirs; conducted extensive interviews with participants, including Yeltsin, shortly before his death last year; and synthesized a story that anyone curious about contemporary Russia will find illuminating. And though this is densely researched scholarship, Mr. Colton writes a fluid narrative that only occasionally wanders into the briar patch of academic-speak.
Yeltsin’s grievance against the Communists began before he was born, in an all-too-common history of family heartbreak that Mr. Colton pieces together with a good deal of original reporting. The Yeltsins were dispossessed for the bourgeois crime of having built a farm, mill and blacksmithing business. Yeltsin’s grandfather died a broken man. His father was charged with the catch-all crime of “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda” for grousing at his job on a construction site, and sent to a forced-labor camp for three years.
When Yeltsin joined the Communist Party, it was not out of devotion to the professed ideals but because a party card was a requirement for promotion to chief engineer in the construction industry. And when he moved into the hierarchy, he was already a man who chafed at party orthodoxy. No radical, he “nibbled at the edges of what was admissible,” Mr. Colton writes, pushing for market prices in the local farm bazaars, encouraging entrepreneurial initiative in the workplace, complaining that the top-down system smothered self-reliance.
In his moderation he was at first rather like Mr. Gorbachev, Yeltsin’s exact contemporary (the two were born 29 days apart, in 1931), his sponsor for a time, but ultimately his foil and nemesis. Mr. Colton nicely sums up the two men metaphorically: Yeltsin is feline, with an instinct for the great and unexpected leap; Mr. Gorbachev is canine, “trainable, tied to the known and to the previously rewarded.”
Mr. Gorbachev promoted Yeltsin to be Moscow party boss, but soon came to see him as an impetuous showboat. Yeltsin saw Mr. Gorbachev as a vacillating windbag, and made little effort to hide it. He infuriated his party leader by complaining about Mrs. Gorbachev’s meddling in Moscow affairs. They clashed in the Politburo over Yeltsin’s populist jibes at the privileges of party leaders.
The decisive break came in October 1987 when Yeltsin, in a disjointed speech to a (closed) party plenum, declared that people were losing faith in reforms and accused Mr. Gorbachev of tolerating a personality cult. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/page1.aspx
Mr. Gorbachev orchestrated a ritual humiliation and demotion, but half a year later the audacious outcast seized a more public moment — a conference of 5,000 party delegates — to repeat his broadside, assuring both his permanent estrangement from the party and his status as a popular hero.
Shrewdly, Yeltsin recast himself as the champion of the Russian republic — the heart of the Soviet Union — and campaigned for a seat in a new federal Congress of People’s Deputies. Mr. Gorbachev chose to enter the congress in an uncontested seat reserved for party leaders. His unwillingness to subject himself to a popular vote (which, at the time, he probably could have won) was, Mr. Colton recognizes, “a blunder of biblical proportions.” Yeltsin sailed into the parliament despite the Communists’ best efforts, and the tide of credibility had shifted decisively his way.
Mr. Gorbachev’s last gambit, shoring up the Soviet leadership with hard-line appointees, backfired when several tried to overthrow him. That ham-handed coup gave Yeltsin his famous tank-top photo op and his ultimate triumph.
Once he won the Kremlin, Yeltsin began drinking heavily. Mr. Colton concludes that while Yeltsin’s drinking was a distraction and an embarrassment, it did not critically influence his decisions as president.
“No sensible historian would reduce Ataturk’s or Churchill’s career to his drinking escapades,” Mr. Colton writes, generously. The booze did, however, ruin Yeltsin’s health; he had at least four heart attacks before bypass surgery.
The last half of the book has Yeltsin confronting the blank slate of post-Communist Russia. His three highly improvisational terms as Russian president were marked by periods of political gridlock, government by decree and constant intrigues, including a near-impeachment. His crash economic program, which Russians joked was all shock and no therapy, was meant to unleash entrepreneurial energy. But it also unleashed colossal avarice and corruption, along with five years of economic misery.
In defense, Mr. Colton writes, “By the day Yeltsin called it quits in 1999, the cradle of state socialism boasted a market economy of sorts,” inflation had been subdued, economic growth rebounded.
“Reforming the system from within, as Gorbachev meant to do,” he writes, “was a respectable choice. Heading for the exits was a cleaner and better one.”
Within this democratizer — whom Mr. Colton ranks alongside Mr. Mandela — there resided a deeply Russian and sometimes ruthless fear of instability. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
He rebuffed entreaties from his liberal supporters to uproot the K.G.B. Indeed, in his appointments he often reached for young security apparatchiks, men he regarded as possessing “steel backbone.”
Most of these securocrats he discarded when he grew disenchanted or needed a scapegoat. But the last in the line, Vladimir V. Putin, endured and became Yeltsin’s successor because he captured public esteem and loyally stood by Yeltsin through severe tests, including the bloody crushing of Chechnya.
In retirement, Mr. Colton says, Yeltsin confided mounting disapproval as his protégé tightened the screws on the press and political opposition. No doubt — and Yeltsin can’t be entirely blamed for his successor (any more than Mr. Mandela could have foreseen how his hand-picked successor would disappoint South Africa). But Mr. Putin is doubly Yeltsin’s legacy. Yeltsin anointed him, and the persistent popularity of his hard regime owes something to the stomach-churning ride of Yeltsin-style democracy.
Researchers have identified two common genetic mutations that increase the risk of osteoporosis and related bone fractures, according to a study released Tuesday.
These changes were present in 20 percent of the people studied and highlight the potential role of screening for osteoporosis, the bone-thinning disease that mainly affects women after menopause, they said in the journal Lancet.
''Eventually, a panel of genetic markers could be used in addition to environmental risk factors to identify individuals who are most at risk for osteoporotic fractures,'' wrote Tim Spector and Brent Richards, researchers at King's College London.
Osteoporosis is a condition in which bone density thins as more bone cells are lost than replaced when people age.
It affects about one in three women and one in five men around the world, according to the International Osteoporosis Foundation.
Drugs called bisphosphonates are used primarily to increase bone mass and cut the risk of fractures in patients with osteoporosis.
These include Fosamax, produced by Merck & Company, which American researchers on Monday showed could increase the risk of a type of abnormal heartbeat.
In the Lancet study, the team scanned the genes of 2,094 female twins and identified a link between decreased bone mineral density and changes in chromosomes 8 and 11.
In chromosome 11, the change was associated with a 30 percent increased risk of the condition and related fractures, and for chromosome 8, the mutation raised risk by 20 percent.
For people who had both changes, their risk went up by 30 percent.
These two genes are important targets for treatments, and drugs are already under development, the researchers said.
President Jimmy Carter was the first President of the United States of America to have officially reported the UFO he saw to the authorities. He was also the President who said that if elected he would see that UFO-Alien Full Disclosure would take place. That the American public would be told the truth about everything was one of the campaign cries of Jimmy Carter. Carter made a promise he could not or would not be able to keep.
After Carter won the White House, he paid a visit to the then-CIA Director, George Bush. Carter had an interest in UFOs ever since experiencing his first sighting sometime in 1969 while standing outside a Lion's Club in Georgia. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/page1.aspx
His campaign speeches promising to unravel the government's long held cover-up was the "Parting of the Red Sea" for Ufologists not only in America but around the world. Here was the one guy who would open up the "Promised Land" and lead them into Full Disclosure.
Carter wanted the U.S. Government's UFO secret documents declassified. George Bush more or less told Carter that the President of the United States did not have the need to know the information contained in those documents. Can you even begin to imagine that? What lends even more mind-blowing credibility to this alleged event between Carter and Bush is the credibility of the allegation maker: Daniel Sheehan.
Daniel Sheehan was born in1946 and graduated from Harvard Law School. There, he was co-founder of the Harvard Civil Rights and Civil Liberty Law Review. He went on to work for the American Civil Liberties Union and became general counsel for a host of entities including The Disclosure Project-a group dedicated to getting the U.S. Government to allow full and unfettered access to what the Feds know about the UFO-Alien phenomenon.
According to Sheehan, Bush Senior, who was the CIA Director, refused Carter's request for disclosure of the UFO documents, even to the President of the United States, because it was generally believed in the halls and corridors of the secret, black-ops government that Carter would then turn the truth over to the American people.
Director of a California think tank, Sheehan's credentials are impeccable. Sheehan's career is a litany of high-profile cases like, "legal counsel team for the New York Times' Pentagon Papers case, defense of the Berrigan brothers, going after the Kerr-McGee nuclear plant (Karen Silkwood), Three-Mile Island, Iran-Contra. At the Disclosure Conference, Sheehan says the Bush-Carter story was relayed to him in 1977 by Marcia Smith of the Congressional Research Service, part of the Library of Congress."
Sheehan's interest in this phenomenon came about when Sheehan met Marcia Smith through a mutual acquaintance. Smith told Sheehan that she was involved in a research project for the Science and Technology Committee of the Library of Congress that would address the issues of the potential existence of extraterrestrial intelligence and make an evaluation of the data on the phenomena of UFOs. When Sheehan queried Smith as to who exactly wanted this study done, her answer was none other than Jimmy Carter.
This all was with a view to investigate exactly what could or could not be turned over to the general public, according to Daniel Sheehan.
Smith asked Sheehan if he could, since he was the then-General Counsel to United States Jesuit Headquarters at their National Office in Washington D.C., get access to the records on the UFO-Alien issue contained in the Vatican. Though Sheehan made repeated attempts to gain access to the Vatican's documents through official channels, he was refused each time. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/
This makes one wonder just why, if all there is to this UFO-Alien issue is weather balloons, flocks of geese, and swamp gas, would the Vatican (or any government on the earth, for that matter) have top-secret, and highly unattainable records pertaining to a nonexistent issue?
After telling Marcia Smith of his roadblock with the Vatican Library, she asked if he could help with a team that was lobbying Congressional leader to reinstate funds for the SETI (Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program. Sheehan indicated to Smith that he was glad to help out. Smith also later asked him if he could help out with an investigation into "the potential theological religious implications of potential contact with extraterrestrial civilizations."
This again begs the question that if there's nothing at all to this phenomenon, then why this study?
Sheehan agreed to Smith's request but insisted he have access to the documents pertaining to this issue that she had garnered for an investigation she did for the Science and Technology Committee in Congress. When asked what exactly Sheehan wanted to see, he indicated he wanted access to "the classified sections of the Project Blue Book."
Astoundingly, Daniel was granted access.
He was not allowed to take notes, photos, or carry anything into the room containing the documents or out with him when he left the Library of Congress where the documents were stored. After proceeding through multiple layers of security, he was shown to the room with microfiche machines. Before entering, he was told he could not take his briefcase with him. Almost absent-mindedly, he had a yellow legal pad under his arm that wasn't confiscated before he entered the room. He proceeded through small canisters of film. It didn't take long to find proof.
He discovered photos of what appeared to be a disc-shaped craft. It had crashed.
"It had hit into this field and had dug up, kind of plowed this kind of trough through this field. It was wedged into the side of this bank. There was snow all around the picture. The vehicle was wedged into the side of this mud-like embankment -- kind of up at an angle."
The men taking photos were unmistakably, in Sheehan's mind, American Air Force personnel.
As Sheehan continued to review the film, he discovered a close-up of the craft that revealed symbols or glyphs written on the craft. He thought it was an insignia. He wanted to record what he saw, but remembered he was not allowed to take notes. He knew it was likely his legal pad would be discovered when he left the room and the guards would examine it to see if he had taken notes. http://louis-j-sheehan.org/
However, since he wanted those insignias, he had to find a way to record them. He decided to arrange the cardboard backing of his legal pad in such a way against the microfiche screen so he could trace the symbols. When he left the top-secret document room, he was searched. His pad was taken and flipped through for notes. Finding none, and not noticing the traced symbols on the cardboard backing of the yellow pad, it was returned to him by the guards and Sheehan left.
Sheehan not only revealed to Marcia Smith what he had found but he also revealed the information to his boss at the Jesuit National Headquarters. Meetings and conventions were convened on the issue. Reports were written. President Carter saw at least one of the reports made by Marcia Smith, which included information from Daniel Sheehan's discoveries.
Sheehan still has the yellow notepad with the symbols but says no analysis has been done on the symbols.
Oh, are you wondering about the reports Marcia Smith finished after Daniel Sheehan's discovery and what they said? Well, Sheehan read them and according to Sheehan:
"The one report that Marcia showed me on extraterrestrial phenomena actually stated that it was the conclusion of the Library of Congress, Science and Technology Division, that from two to six, at least, other highly-intelligent, technologically-developed civilizations exist right within our own galaxy." [sources]
"The second report," says Sheehan, "they had drawings of different shapes of UFOs that have been sighted," continued Sheehan. "They didn't site any particular cases, but they said that they believed there was a significant number of instances where the official United States Air Force investigations were unable to discount the possibility that one or more of these vehicles was actually from one of these extraterrestrial civilizations. They put this together, and sent it over to the President. I ended up seeing a copy of it."
The Carter Administration, though not bringing about Full Disclosure, had a very busy four years of UFO phenomena. I can't help but wonder if he had had another term in office, what could have come of all of this?
If there's a skill or process you want to learn or know more about, chances are there's an online video for it. These days you can find a video that will teach you to cook, survive college, build your own headphones or even become a better kisser.
This week, I took a look at just a few Web sites that make finding these videos easy, including Howcast Media Inc.'s Howcast.com1, WonderHowTo.com2 from WonderHowTo Inc. and eHow Inc.'s eHow.com3. Howcast.com, which launched in February, encourages users to make and share good-quality, entertaining videos by providing tools on its site, and has about 5,000 videos so far. WonderHowTo.com, launched in January, used a different strategy by aggregating over 110,000 videos from various sources -- including Howcast, YouTube and Scripps Networks -- rather than publishing its own content. EHow, a site that started in 1999 with text-only content, contains over 100,000 instructional articles submitted by its users or eHow editors, and has a small catalog of videos. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/page1.aspx
Howcast videos can be seen in full-screen mode using a player that illustrates step-by-step text instructions beside video screens.
After testing each of these sites, I found that my favorite how-to videos had steps that were clearly labeled and numbered and the ability to fast forward to or play back specific parts in the video -- tools that Howcast included in almost all of its videos. At least some of the videos on the three sites simply illustrate things you could likely figure out how to do without watching a video, such as "How to Make Green Beer." (Add food coloring.) Howcast.com and WonderHowTo both require users to sign in, which confirms their date of birth, before looking at what they consider "mature" content.
These three free sites are advertisement-supported, and Howcast's ads run alongside videos. WonderHowTo.com runs ads at the top and side of its own site, on which it will play certain videos. But because videos on WonderHowTo come from other sources, those other sites can show video-embedded ads according to their rules. EHow's videos run pop-up text advertisements displaying names and links of other related (and sometimes unrelated) Web sites. But I couldn't get the pop-up ads to stay closed.
Overall, I preferred the look of Howcast's site and its well-organized videos. But its content paled in comparison to WonderHowTo's 110,000 videos and even eHow's 100,000 instructional articles. WonderHowTo.com does a nice job of gathering content from across the Web, though the inconsistencies of other sites (including advertisements, layout and video player) were a bit frustrating. EHow's articles were useful, as were its few videos, but I couldn't get over the site's unyielding video pop-up ads.
Howcast.com's content was informative with an amusing edge, including a video titled "How to Tell If Your Boyfriend's A Psycho."(If he calls 50 times a day, for example.) Other videos on the site are more serious, like "How to Make Sushi" by an executive sushi chef in New York City.
The founders of Howcast Media formerly worked in Google's video department, including during the acquisition of YouTube. All of Howcast's content comes from one of four sources: written and produced by Howcast in its studios; emerging filmmakers who apply and are accepted into the Howcast Directors Program to receive $50 a video and 50% of the advertising revenue generated from videos that generate over 40,000 views on the site; content partners like Popular Science; and Howcast users' personal how-to videos.
In order to make it easier for average users to upload better-looking videos, Howcast provides an Upload and Enhance tool that simply and quickly adds professional-looking graphics and printable steps to go along with how-to videos. This formula makes videos more enjoyable to watch. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/
Videos made in the Howcast Studios include accompanying music, good narratives and actors who add humor to an otherwise humdrum how-to. Among its helpful features is a video player that has smart blue markers to show where facts are sprinkled throughout the video and green markers to illustrate where tips appear. For example, the fact at the end of a video for beginner guitarists called "How to Play a Basic Bar Chord" is "The late Kurt Cobain claimed he was trying to rip off the Pixies when he wrote 'Smells Like Teen Spirit. '" In full-screen view, users can zoom in on any part of a video, and written-out steps and thumbnail stills of the scene appear to the right of the screen.
Howcast tries to run ads alongside videos that relate to the content. A video titled "How To Clean Your Dog's Teeth" has an ad for PetSmart Stores running on its page.
WonderHowTo.com was developed by a former television executive with the intention of using the site to produce its own video, like Howcast.com. Instead, WonderHowTo.com opted to tap the vast selection of how-to videos already available on the Web.
A Browse button pulls down 35 categories from which users can sort content, including Spirituality, Dating & Relationships and Fitness. In the Fashion subcategory under Beauty & Style, I found 290 videos including one on "How to Tie a Windsor Knot" and another titled "How to Turn Old Underpants Into a Bra" -- neither of which I'll be using anytime soon. Other categories include Clip of the Day, Recommendations (for users who are logged in) and Fresh, where new videos are listed. Users can grade videos to help others tell which they think are the best, and a Top Grade category compiles the top-ranked videos.
WonderHowTo's content comes from over 700 sites, according to the company. I used the site to find a video on YouTube about how to do a front-flip, clips on VideoJug.com that provided terrific tennis tips from a coach, and a video from EasyBarTricks.com about how to stick a beer bottle to a wall without glue or gum. (Hint: You'll need a corner and a wall you don't mind marking up.) WonderHowTo made it easier to find these videos than by performing a general search on the Web.
I submitted a non-how-to video to this site by simply entering a URL, without logging in. I never found the video I submitted on the site; WonderHowTo explained that it screens all videos prior to posting them, so it must have found my video.
EHow.com uses its database of articles to encourage people to watch videos, when they're relevant. This site uses calm, pastel colors to give a relaxed feeling -- especially compared with WonderHowTo, where banner ads surround the page. EHow's 26 categories include Parenting, Parties & Entertaining and Weddings. Twelve subcategories within Weddings led to 23 articles about Bridal Party Responsibilities -- a popular topic was "How To Deal With a Bridezilla." Related videos, such as "How To Get Rid of Wedding Day Jitters," ran along the right of the page. http://louis-j-sheehan.org/page1.aspx
Videos can also be found on eHow within a marked tab at the top of the page. But unlike the articles on eHow, these videos weren't well organized or as easily searchable. I watched one of eHow's Featured Videos called "How to Know if Your Toe Is Broken," but after closing a pop-up ad for UPS during Step One of the video, another ad popped up during Step Five. Neither ad had anything to do with broken toes.
But the eHow videos were professional-looking and included quite a few tips that I didn't know. That broken toe video was submitted by the eHow Health Editor, and a link at the top of the page led me to hundreds of other health-related articles. I found another video on "How To Remove Wallpaper," which was posted by the Home & Garden Editor and included a list of things I would need to proceed, along with numbered steps.
It isn't always easy to learn from the information you find online, and how-to videos can be a big help -- especially when they're well-made and easy to find using one of these sites. Howcast.com has well-presented content that was enjoyable to watch, but WonderHowTo.com offers a better variety of instructional videos.
Kim Cattrall has played everything from a Vulcan in "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country" to an Egyptian princess in 1987's "Mannequin," but her big break didn't come until 1997, when she was cast in HBO's "Sex and the City." Ms. Cattrall's portrayal of Samantha Jones in the series earned her five Emmy nominations and a Golden Globe award. This month, Ms. Cattrall, 51 years old, reprises the role in the new movie, "Sex and the City." She says her comic timing can be traced to her love of black-and-white screwball comedies. "I'm inspired by actresses like Lucille Ball and Marilyn Monroe," she says. "You can't teach what they do." She spoke with us about her favorite romantic comedies.
'My Man Godfrey,' 1936
In this comedy, Carole Lombard plays a daffy socialite who discovers a vagrant (William Powell) in the city dump and hires him as her butler. Before long, she is in love with him. "Carole Lombard is so glamorous," says Ms. Cattrall. "Every day she wakes up looking fabulous and somebody brings her breakfast. I haven't had breakfast in bed recently enough."
'His Girl Friday,' 1940
Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell star in Howard Hawks's remake of the 1931 newsroom comedy "The Front Page." Ms. Russell's character, Hildy Johnson, originally was written for a man. "She looked like a little guy, the way she would sit on the desk," Ms. Cattrall says of the performance.
'Sullivan's Travels,' 1941
Preston Sturges wrote and directed this film about a privileged Hollywood director, played by Joel McCrea, who decides the only way he can understand the poor is to pretend to be one of them. "Joel McCrea was such an underrated actor," says Ms. Cattrall. "I could watch that movie over and over just for his delivery."
'I Married a Witch,' 1942
René Clair directed this film about a witch who is burned in 17th-century Salem and returns in the guise of a 20th-century woman (Veronica Lake), only to fall in love with a descendant of the man who killed her. "It's supposed to be a comedy about love between a witch and a mortal, but really it's about accepting people as they are," says Ms. Cattrall. http://louis-j-sheehan.com/
'Woman of the Year,' 1942
Katharine Hepburn was nominated for an Oscar for her portrayal of a self-absorbed newspaper columnist who falls in love with Spencer Tracy's rumpled sportswriter. "My favorite scene is when Spencer Tracy comes to the office to ask her to marry him," Ms. Cattrall says. "The timing on that is impeccable."
Every winter, hordes of divers head to the congested, overdeveloped scuba-diving destinations of the Caribbean and the Red Sea. But there's a less-traversed option: Fly to Moscow, take the railroad 27 hours north, and drive two hours along snow-covered dirt roads to a village almost on the Arctic Circle, along an inlet of the White Sea. Then, take a snowmobile to a small black triangle cut into the ice.
Ice diving is one of the last great scuba adventures. WSJ's Mark Schoofs ice dives in the White Sea in Northern Russia and gives a peek into an underwater world full of sea creatures.
Ice diving is one of the last grand scuba adventures. Popular destinations include Antarctica, Newfoundland and certain lakes in the Austrian Alps. One of the best -- and least known -- is Russia's White Sea.
There, diaphanous, rainbow-tinged comb jellies (like jellyfish without the tentacles) float by. On rocks lie starfish and related brittle stars of every description. There are ophiuras, whose thin, spidery legs are striped wine-red and cream-white, and there are glittering, ruby-red crossasters with stubby legs, each tipped with delicate, filament tentacles. Luxuriant forests of large round anemones, each one ivory or pink-orange, look like some 1960s hallucinogenic art installation. Among them live multicolored sponges and algae, colonies of barnacles and tiny neon-lavender skeleton crabs. Wolf fish hide in crevasses. On the sea bed billow acres of low-growing kelp, whose undulation is as mesmerizing as a Bach fugue.
Above it all is the ice, almost alive, filtering sunlight into varying shades of emerald and gold. When one finally ascends back up through the ice hole, or maina, one literally ascends into light.
Marine life in the White Sea is so rich partly because cold water holds more oxygen than warm water, and in winter, the water is below freezing, about 30 degrees Fahrenheit. That means divers need gear -- lots of it. A dry suit, unlike the more common wet suit, is mandatory. With a zipper derived from a NASA design, and a seal on the neck, it keeps the body perfectly dry.
On my recent seven-day diving trip here with a Russian company, I wore three layers under a dry suit: a union suit made of polypropylene to wick away sweat, thick fleece long johns, and an even thicker Thinsulate-insulated undergarment that looks like a snowsuit. I wore two pairs of socks and Thinsulate booties, plus chemical toe warmers that react with air to generate heat. I used them on my hands, too, where I wore three layers of gloves under rubber outer gloves.
My head was in two neoprene hoods, a thin one underneath a thick one that tucked into a collar to protect my neck. A mask covered the skin around my nose and eyes. Only my lips, which held the mouthpiece connecting me to the air supply, were exposed directly to the cold water. Lips have such good blood flow that they don't go numb but merely tingle upon entry. http://louis-j-sheehan.com/page1.aspx
Donning all this gear, plus fins, tank, and the lead weights that help a diver sink, takes about half an hour. We suited up in mobile huts on skis, where gas heaters made me feel like a mummy working out in a sauna. Slipping into the cold water was a relief.
How to Get There: Aeroflot flies to Moscow nonstop from Los Angeles for around $900. Delta flies nonstop from New York for around $1,000.Then it's a flight to Murmansk, or a train ride to Chupa.
Book a Trip: Peak ice-diving season is February to April. In summer, there's no ice, but the scenery and 24-hour daylight are draws. RuDive starts taking reservations a year in advance (www.dive.ru/pages/page/show_lang/25.en.htm2). Early booking is advised, especially for groups. Standard tours go from Sunday to Friday. Custom trips can last longer or, as some Russians and Finns prefer, for a weekend.
Price: A week of ice-diving at the White Sea with RuDive -- including lessons, a room with private bath and train travel to and from Moscow -- is about $1,750 per person.
But the cold harbors danger. Valves can freeze, either blasting a diver with free-flowing air or shutting off the air supply altogether. Every air tank for ice diving has two valves, not the standard one for warm-water diving, and the mouthpiece valve has a freeze-resistant design. Even so, I encountered an emergency. I wore a vest that inflated and deflated to control buoyancy, and a valve on it froze open, ballooning the vest and sending me straight up. I was pinned against the ice, unable to swim freely, with the air in my tank rapidly flowing out. The safety of the terrestrial world was less than a foot away but walled off by impenetrable ice.
This is the second danger of ice diving: To ascend to the surface, one must return to the ice hole. Out of air and wearing close to 100 pounds of gear, even 25 yards underwater can be a long, even lethal distance. Each diver is secured to a rope connected to two other people: a buddy in the water and a tender on the surface. My buddy saw my trouble and gave the emergency signal: Four yanks of the rope, and our tender hauled us in. We skated along the ice's underside, a sensation so fun and beautiful that I forgot the danger. Up on top, our tender doused the valve with hot water from a thermos, and we resumed our dive.
Living so intimately with ice, one realizes it is anything but static. A brilliant sun shone during the first two days. But then a heavy snow fell, and when we went to the maina, the water seemed to have risen, forming a puddle on the ice. The weight of the snow had pushed the ice down, forcing water up through the hole. On another day, we were diving when a storm roared in. Our guides, concerned that large waves on the open sea would create surges capable of cracking the ice, decided we would leave.
Even without storms, the tides rise and fall more than six feet, so the ice at the shore continually cracks, refreezes and cracks again. Underneath, the constant friction sculpts the ice into breathtaking forms through which light streams as if through a kaleidoscope.
Topside, the muted light of a snowstorm or a sunset brings forth the full range of color in arctic ice: every conceivable variation of white and grey and a softly iridescent blue that seems to emanate from deep within. At night, the wind sweeps stretches of ice clean of snow, and they gleam obsidian black. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/page1.aspx
The underside of the ice is bubbled like a sponge, and in many of the holes live tiny crustaceans. Blow scuba bubbles, and they fall out like living rain.
Two former marine biologists, Dmitri Orlov and Mikhail Safonov, founded the outfit that organized this expedition, the RuDive Group, which offers world-wide scuba tours. In 1996, after the Soviet Union crumbled and science funding dried up, Mr. Safonov and Mr. Orlov began offering diving lessons, and in 1998 they began taking customers to the White Sea.
Five years ago, they opened their own diving center there, with comfortable wooden chalets offering accommodations from hostel-style dorms with shared baths to private rooms. Meals are hearty, often featuring local smoked fish, fresh vegetables and fruit and preserves made from local berries.
About seven years ago, Mr. Safonov recalls, a woman ice-diving with a predecessor company he and his partner founded and ran died in a Moscow lake at a depth of about 10 feet. The exact circumstances weren't clear, but spurred largely by the event, RuDive now requires all customers to have ice-diving certification from the Professional Association of Diving Instructors. Customers can get ice-diving certification at the start of their trip. RuDive has added to the standard training to enhance safety.
In 1999, Mr. Safonov participated in what is believed to be the first successful scuba expedition to the North Pole. The ice there forms underwater "castles," he says, and the water is as clear as air. Last month, he returned from RuDive's fifth successful polar diving trip. The cost: $40,000 per person.
RuDive's White Sea center has two captive beluga whales, owned by a Russian aquarium and held in a netted sea pen. The one-ton males circled in swift arabesques, then came straight at me, playfully biting my leg and fins the way a dog would. It was amazing fun, but the experience had traces of the amusement park. It was an escape from reality, not an immersion in it.
By contrast, the maina, its black water a portal between worlds, feels exhilaratingly real. When a snowstorm transforms the topside into a swirl of white, it's the perfect moment to slip into a winter of anemones and comb jellies and luminous green-gold ice.
If you were asked to list literary classics, it is unlikely that "Little Red Riding Hood" would be the first to come to mind. You might think of the Bible or Shakespeare, since they are the two most widely owned masterworks of Western literature. But, as novelist A.S. Byatt notes, "Grimms' Fairy Tales," which contains the popular "Little Red Riding Hood," is probably third. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm collected tales from folk sources, and published their "Children's and Household Tales" in 1812. To make the stories more literary and more appropriate for children, they made revisions throughout their seven editions, the last published in 1857.
These fairy tales deal with the same issues, such as love and death, as all great literature. They do so without hiding violence, hate, or even lust, making them quite different from most children's books of today. They set a standard for literary works -- Vladimir Nabokov was right when he said that all great novels are great fairy tales.
The stories are presented both concretely and magically, matching the child's manner of thinking. With their great emotional and moral power, and with their being first heard at an early age, they are more than literary. They suggest a model of living for the child.
"Little Red Riding Hood" is about a beautiful girl leaving home to visit her sick grandmother. The heroine starts down a path, carrying cakes and wine to make Grandma feel better. Along the way, she meets a friendly wolf who asks her where she is going. The charming Red Riding Hood all but invites him to meet her at Grandma's by pinpointing the location of her house. The wolf thinks, "What a tender young creature! What a nice plump mouthful."
The wolf persuades Little Red Riding Hood to wander off into the woods to see the beautiful flowers, to hear the birds singing and to enjoy the merry woods. This ploy allows the wolf to rush off to eat Grandma, disguise himself as her, and wait in bed for the girl. When she arrives, she questions the wolf about his appearance. And when she finally asks about his big teeth, he famously replies "The better to eat you with" and devours her.
Sated, the wolf falls asleep. Luckily, a hunter walks by, checks on Grandma, and discovers what has happened. He cuts open the wolf's belly, releasing Grandma and Little Red Riding Hood, both unharmed. Then Red Riding Hood springs into action herself and kills the wolf by piling rocks in his belly. http://louis7j7sheehan7esquire.blogspot.com/
The fairy tale is fantastic, but that is necessary because of children's magical thinking. Their thought is illogical, impulsive and omnipotent. They are not surprised that a wolf talks or that two people can be retrieved whole from his belly. The little girl hearing the story does not simply identify with the little girl in the tale, as an adult might -- she becomes Little Red Riding Hood. Some parents argue that there is too much unreality in fairy tales. On the contrary, the narrative resonates with a child's notion of reality. These tales speak directly to children in their own language; by doing so, they exert their influence.
Another device in "Grimms'" is the use of absolutes. In "Snow White," Mother is divided into the entirely good queen who died and the unremittingly cruel stepmother who wishes to kill the girl. In "Little Red Riding Hood," fatherly attributes are split between the good protective hunter and the sinful, animalistic wolf. Since children themselves think in absolutes, a clean division of attributes makes it easier for the child to consider opposite qualities.
Violence and sexuality are, as the Grimm scholar Maria Tatar says, "the major thematic concern of the tales . . . at least in their unedited form." Rumpelstiltskin tears himself in two, Snow White's stepmother dances herself to death in red-hot iron shoes, and Hansel and Gretel are left in the forest to die. (If these scenes are unfamiliar, you have read a bowdlerized version. These "retellings" are to the Grimms what Cliffs Notes are to Shakespeare.)
But the Brothers Grimm cannot be blamed for introducing alien thoughts into the child's mind. The child has his own fears of and desires for violence before encountering the fairy tales. He will never experience the precise situations that occur in "Grimms'," but he does fear death and abandonment. He also has his own monstrous and destructive wishes. All this is obvious from even the most cursory observation of preschoolers' play. The genius of these tales is that they intuitively address such wishes and fears -- and allow the child to use the narrative to master them. Little Red Riding Hood not only survives the wolf's cannibalism but she kills him -- she has become a more assertive person.
Sexuality is subtle in the Grimms' telling of that story, but not in earlier versions. In one, a werewolf demands that the girl strip and get in bed with him, but she escapes. In the Perrault version of 1797, Little Red Riding Hood takes off her clothes and climbs into bed with "Father Wolf." In the Grimms' story, she virtually invites him to Grandma's house, where she is bringing treats that are ideal for a party. The "old sinner" delights in conversing with her, gets rid of Grandma, and waits for her in bed. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx
Why is sexuality present? One answer is that the stories are derived from bawdy folktales. A more compelling explanation is that the tales include it because children are sexual beings. Psychoanalysts have long held this view, which became popular through Bruno Bettelheim's tendentiously brilliant analyses in "The Uses of Enchantment."
Little Red Riding Hood is unconsciously working through her attraction to her own father, who is never mentioned in the story; instead, she becomes involved with the rapacious "father wolf" and is later saved by the protective fatherly hunter. In the end, she kills the wolf, thus renouncing her oedipal desires for her father. The child who hears the story has learned about the dangers of loving unwisely.
The dilemma for Little Red Riding Hood is the extent to which she must keep to the straight path. Thanks to her dallying in the woods, Grandma and she are eaten, but there is no overt moralizing. By the time the story ends, Little Red Riding Hood has not only taken action against the wolf but also makes a promise to herself to heed her mother's warnings, and thus is better prepared to avoid the wrong partner in the future. The Grimms allow the child to consider such issues unconsciously, without being subjected to a heavy dose of didacticism.
"Little Red Riding Hood," like the other great fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, ends happily -- but not with "they lived happily ever after." Red Riding Hood has more work to do; she is not yet ready for her prince.
For adults, telling the story to a child is the richest of pleasures. The storyteller revisits a classic and the vital issues it raises. He can marvel at the fascination of the child. But most important, the child's enchantment becomes the teller's too, and parent and child join to share that enchantment. It is one of those rare moments in adult life when one can recapture the magic of one's own early youth. http://louis-j-sheehan.us/
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Louis J. Sheehan Esquire
At a time when the Cassandras of finance are looking like realists, there is no gloomier prophet than Kevin Phillips. The author of 13 previous books including at least one classic, “The Emerging Republican Majority,” Mr. Phillips sees a perfect economic storm coming. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
The final pages of his bleak new book, “Bad Money,” tell of an “unprecedented” number of Americans planning to leave the country or thinking about it. Readers of “Bad Money” may come away with a similar impulse to flee.
Mr. Phillips begins with an overview of the current debt debacle. The 1980s were the start of “three profligate decades,” when the expansion of mortgage credit and the invention of financial instruments like collateralized debt obligations (C.D.O.’s) led to an orgy of leveraging and irresponsible speculation. The Federal Reserve kept the bubble afloat with easy money, while regulators and ratings agencies looked the other way.
By 2007 total indebtedness was three times the size of the gross domestic product, a ratio that surpassed the record set in the years of the Great Depression. From 2001 to 2007 alone, domestic financial debt grew to $14.5 trillion from $8.5 trillion, and home mortgage debt ballooned to almost $10 trillion from $4.9 trillion, an increase of 102 percent. A crisis in the mortgage market in August 2007 brought the party to an end. Since then we have been living in a twilight zone of what a security analyst quoted in the book calls “one of the slowest-moving train wrecks we’ve seen.”
The second component of the perfect storm is the upheaval in the oil industry. Domestic production peaked in 1971, and there are signs that production worldwide is also peaking. (Mr. Phillips cites experts who believe it already has.) http://louis-j-sheehan.net/page1.aspx
Louis J. Sheehan Esquire
And with the emergence of new economic powers like China and India, demand has risen dramatically and prices have been climbing steadily; by 2004 a rapidly growing China had become the second largest oil consumer, after the United States. Despite the bad news at the gas pump, however, America has actually been getting a cost break, because the major suppliers price their oil in dollars. But with the dollar falling, OPEC has been talking about moving into other currencies. Were that to happen, “the effects,” Mr. Phillips says tersely, “could be painful.”
Finally, Mr. Phillips turns to what he terms America’s “calcified” political system. We may need new regulations to deal with the debt mess, along with an energy policy to address the changing world of oil, but Washington, he says, has become dedicated to “the politics of evasion,” reluctant to pass dramatic reforms or to call for sacrifice from the public. Democrats and Republicans alike are so entrenched, so dependent on campaign money and special interests, that “the notion of a breath of fresh air has become almost a contradiction in terms.” Instead of a “vital center” in Washington, we now have a “venal center.” Mr. Phillips holds out little hope of improvement from a new president; he doubts that any administration could do much, even though “the crisis is no longer in the future, but upon us.”
Is such pessimism justified? Mr. Phillips says he is making no predictions, but that’s not quite true. Throughout his book he tends to lean on the darkest analyses, though others might be less grim. And as readers of his earlier books know, he has a penchant for seeing parallels between the current situation in the United States and the declines of 17th-century Spain, the 18th-century Dutch Republic and early-20th-century Britain.
But historical comparisons are always dangerous playthings (remember all those foreign-policy analogies to Munich?): you necessarily have to cherry-pick eras and evidence from history’s panorama. Perhaps there are similarities in the financial arrangements of monarchical Spain and democratic America, as Mr. Phillips says, but the differences between the two societies are far greater. It’s hard not to feel that Mr. Phillips’s argument has been shaped not only by his facts but also by his temperament.
Still, even if his pessimism doesn’t seem wholly warranted, a sense of foreboding surely is, which is why his warnings have to be taken seriously. Mr. Phillips writes that the inventors and marketers of the new financial instruments didn’t entirely understand them. An executive of Fidelity International says a panicky feeling has set in on Wall Street because no one knows where the risks really are. The finance minister of France observes that investments may have reached such a level of complexity that no one can assess them. And Charles R. Morris, in his own gloomy book, “The Trillion Dollar Meltdown,” reports that even Citigroup’s chief financial officer “did not know how to value his holdings.”
The screenwriter William Goldman once declared that in Hollywood “nobody knows anything.” When Wall Street begins to resemble the American Dream Factory, it’s a safe bet that something has gone terribly wrong.
Roberto Clemente, the superb right fielder of the Pittsburgh Pirates from 1955 to 1972, the year he died in a plane crash, exists in a baseball Eden of the mind. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/page1.aspx
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Cut down just past his prime and just before the free-agency era, he avoided the embarrassments the sport hands out to its greatest stars: mercenary team-hopping, years of declining performance, drug scandals, card shows. For those who can remember, he’s forever winding up for another monstrous throw to home plate.
“Roberto Clemente,” an “American Experience” documentary on most PBS stations Monday night, is not out to disturb this picture. If anything, it wants to put the halo more firmly in place, concentrating on his pride in his Puerto Rican heritage and his roles as a racial trailblazer and humanitarian. (He was taking supplies to earthquake victims when he died.)
But this absorbing account of his life also reminds us that the picture was more complicated. Clemente faced discrimination, suspicion and ridicule through much of his career; he was a moody, private and sensitive man who had a tense relationship with the press. “I can’t say I enjoyed talking with him,” the Pittsburgh sportswriter Roy McHugh recalls.
It seems likely that if Clemente were playing baseball today, he’d join Alex Rodriguez and Barry Bonds in the ranks of baseball’s tabloid antiheroes, worshiped when hitting well and vilified the rest of the time. The film’s reference to his early adoption of protein shakes and other “odd concoctions” even makes you wonder what he would have done if told that the occasional shot of human-growth hormone would help his injuries heal faster.
The attractions of “Roberto Clemente” include interviews with Pirates teammates like Al Oliver and Manny Sanguillen and fascinating film of the Puerto Rican winter league when it was a haven for African-American players unwelcome in the majors. One complaint: the emphasis on Clemente’s life outside baseball cuts into the time spent on the field. And no matter how admirable his sentiments, the true poetry of Roberto Clemente lies in the uninterrupted flight of a baseball from the warning track to the catcher’s mitt. You can’t watch that too many times.
A woman convicted two weeks ago of running a Washington call-girl ring that catered to the capital’s power elite was found dead here Thursday, and the authorities said she had apparently hanged herself.
The body of the woman, Deborah Jeane Palfrey, 52, was found in a shed at her mother’s home here about 20 miles northwest of Tampa. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/page1.aspx
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The police said Ms. Palfrey had left a notebook containing at least two suicide notes and other messages to her family, but they did not give additional details.
Ms. Palfrey, who had quickly become known as the D.C. Madam when the case against her began unfolding, apparently hanged herself from the shed’s ceiling with nylon rope, the police said. Her mother, Blanche Palfrey, discovered the body.
Blanche Palfrey had no sign that her daughter was suicidal, and there was no immediate indication that alcohol or drugs were involved, Capt. Jeffrey Young of the Tarpon Springs Police Department said.
A man who answered a phone listed for the elder Ms. Palfrey declined to comment.
Preston Burton, a lawyer who represented Deborah Jeane Palfrey at her trial, said, “This is tragic news, and my heart goes out to her mother.”
A federal jury in Washington found Ms. Palfrey guilty on April 15 of running a prostitution service that catered to powerful figures including Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana. She was convicted of money laundering, using the mail for illegal purposes and racketeering.
Ms. Palfrey had denied that her escort service had been involved in prostitution, saying that if any of the women had engaged in sexual acts for money, they had done so without her knowledge.
In the aftermath of her conviction, she remained free while awaiting sentencing on July 24. Under sentencing guidelines, she faced about five or six years in prison, Channing Phillips, the spokesman for the United States attorney in the District of Columbia, said Thursday.
But Ms. Palfrey had vowed that she would never go to prison. When she disclosed telephone records last year that revealed the identity of some of her clients, she told ABC: “I’m sure as heck not going to be going to federal prison for one day, let alone four to eight years, because I’m shy about bringing in the deputy secretary of whatever. Not for a second. I’ll bring every last one of them in if necessary.”
Despite that threat, Ms. Palfrey’s trial concluded without the testimony of either Mr. Vitter or another particularly prominent client, Randall L. Tobias. Mr. Tobias resigned as a senior State Department official last year after he had been linked to the escort service, though he said he had used it only for massages. Mr. Vitter, who is married and has four children, remains a first-term member of the Senate.
Dan Moldea, a Washington writer who befriended Ms. Palfrey while considering writing a book about her, said she had been cautiously optimistic about her trial.
After the conviction, however, Mr. Moldea sent her two messages but did not hear back, he said.
After hearing of her death Thursday, he recalled a conversation over dinner last year when the subject of prison came up. http://louis-j-sheehan.org/
“I will commit suicide first,” he remembered her saying.
One of the escort service’s employees was Brandy Britton, a former professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who was arrested on prostitution charges in 2006. Ms. Britton committed suicide in January before she could go to trial.
As other cities look to replace their blighted downtowns with new development, Las Vegas, known for its extravagant facsimiles of European and American landmarks, has come up with an unusual approach: Build another downtown, right next to the decaying one.
On Thursday, the city will formally inaugurate a new urban core on a 61-acre, undeveloped parcel of land — a project that some experts say is unprecedented in city planning. Called Union Park, its supporters hope it will revive the historic downtown just to the east, where the region’s courthouses, government offices and oldest casinos are clustered.
More than $6 billion in mostly private money has been announced for five ambitious projects: an Alzheimer’s research center, designed by Frank Gehry; a 60-story international center for jewelry trading; a hotel by the celebrity chef Charlie Palmer; a casino-resort; thousands of residential units and square feet of office space, and, as its centerpiece, a $360 million performing arts center.
Construction on the rippled Gehry building and utility lines is under way on this former brownfield, once a chemical dumping ground for the Union Pacific Railroad.
“It’s quite unusual that there’s a big swath of downtown ground just sitting there without having to go through a whole rigmarole to acquire,” said Bill Hudnut, a senior fellow at the Urban Land Institute in Washington. Mr. Hudnut, the former mayor of Indianapolis, recalled that acquiring just three blocks of that city “involved some legal fights and eminent domain, the demolition of buildings, numerous deals with numerous owners.” In Las Vegas, he added, “they’re just building new stuff.”
It is an approach recommended to the mayor of Las Vegas, Oscar Goodman, a criminal defense lawyer famed for defending mafia figures, by major developers brought in to tutor him in redevelopment after his election in 1999. The mayor, who admits he ran “almost as a game” to win, said he quickly realized that reversing the downtown area’s decline could become his most important legacy. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/page1.aspx
(Downtown Las Vegas is immediately north of the Strip.)
“They all told me I couldn’t do anything because I didn’t have what I needed,” which was land, recalled Mr. Goodman, now in his third and final term. “I despaired. Then I looked out my window and saw this fallow 61 acres of brownfield.”
The city acquired it by swapping other land with the holding company that owned the parcel. But it would take five years and several failed deals with developers before the city signed with Newland Communities to manage and design the site.
In the meantime, the city’s acquisition spurred other developers to snap up vacant land nearby. Union Park is now surrounded by an outlet mall and 3 of 10 buildings planned for the $3 billion World Market Center, a furniture-industry exposition space. The city’s plans “created the credibility of a Las Vegas that’s open for business outside of the Strip,” said Robert J. Maricich, chief executive and president of World Market Center.
But the national economic downturn may play a role in how soon all of Union Park is realized. Already, the opening date for the $700 million World Jewelry Center has been pushed back one year, and questions abound as to whether the more than 3,000 residential units planned to be built will sell in a state with one of the highest foreclosure rates in the United States.
“There’s no question that the Union Park property is going be developed,” said Matt Ward, editor of the weekly Las Vegas Business Press. “The question is whether some of these projects that were supposed to break ground this year will do so. We’re mainly talking about delays, I think. Are you going to see business leaders in town talking openly about that? Probably not.”
Mr. Goodman has brought his boisterous personality and decades of friendships in the community to bear, persuading the region’s top liquor distributor, Larry Ruvo, to build the Lou Ruvo Brain Institute. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/
The research center, named for Mr. Ruvo’s father, who died of Alzheimer’s disease, is a partnership with the University of Nevada School of Medicine.
The linchpin, though, is the Smith Center for the Performing Arts, Las Vegas’s first stab at a Lincoln Center-style facility that can be home for ballet and philharmonic companies. It will break ground in August.
“We don’t have a cultural hub right now,” said Rita Brandin, the vice president and development director for Newland. “This provides that community gathering place.”
Union Park does have skeptics, including Dave Hickey, culture critic for Vanity Fair, who is baffled by how the development will interconnect with the older downtown area and help in its resurgence. Mr. Hickey’s wife, Libby Lumpkin, is executive director of the Las Vegas Art Museum, and Mr. Hickey noted that Ms. Lumpkin rejected efforts to move that museum to Union Park.
“The idea is that they’re going to put in these public buildings and this is going to make a respectful downtown for Las Vegas without all the glitz and glamour, I guess, but I think it’ll be a ghost town,” Mr. Hickey said. “I don’t see how the comings and goings will be facilitated. And those open spaces that landscape architects so love are not really conducive to the desert climate.”
It also leaves the question of whether the city is abandoning the historic downtown, where all of Las Vegas was born 100 years ago.
Defenders like Ms. Brandin counter: “We’ve got an existing downtown. This is an urban core. It’s complementary.”
And Mr. Goodman said the Union Park effort had helped kick off a decade of redevelopment in the older downtown region, which he expects to connect to Union Park via pedestrian bridges over the railroad tracks that run along the site’s eastern edge. http://louis-j-sheehan.org/page1.aspx
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http://louis1j1sheehan.us/Several casinos have new owners spending millions to upgrade, a bar district is starting to blossom and an old post office is being restored for use as a museum focused on mafia history, complete with interactive wiretapping exhibits. Most important, the mayor noted, are the half-dozen condominium towers nearing completion there.
At a time when the world’s top climate experts agree that carbon emissions must be rapidly reduced to hold down global warming, Italy’s major electricity producer, Enel, is converting its massive power plant here from oil to coal, generally the dirtiest fuel on earth.
Over the next five years, Italy will increase its reliance on coal to 33 percent from 14 percent. Power generated by Enel from coal will rise to 50 percent.
And Italy is not alone in its return to coal. Driven by rising demand, record high oil and natural gas prices, concerns over energy security and an aversion to nuclear energy, European countries are expected to put into operation about 50 coal-fired plants over the next five years, plants that will be in use for the next five decades.
In the United States, fewer new coal plants are likely to begin operations, in part because it is becoming harder to get regulatory permits and in part because nuclear power remains an alternative. Of 151 proposals in early 2007, more than 60 had been dropped by the year’s end, many blocked by state governments. Dozens of other are stuck in court challenges.
The fast-expanding developing economies of India and China, where coal remains a major fuel source for more than two billion people, have long been regarded as among the biggest challenges to reducing carbon emissions. But the return now to coal even in eco-conscious Europe is sowing real alarm among environmentalists who warn that it is setting the world on a disastrous trajectory that will make controlling global warming impossible.
They are aghast at the renaissance of coal, a fuel more commonly associated with the sooty factories of Dickens novels, and one that was on its way out just a decade ago.
There have been protests here in Civitavecchia, at a new coal plant in Germany, and at one in the Czech Republic, as well as at the Kingsnorth power station in Kent, which is slated to become Britain’s first new coal-fired plant in more than a decade.
Europe’s power station owners emphasize that they are making the new coal plants as clean as possible. But critics say that “clean coal” is a pipe dream, an oxymoron in terms of the carbon emissions that count most toward climate change. http://louis-j-sheehan.com/page1.aspx
They call the building spurt shortsighted.
“Building new coal-fired power plants is ill conceived,” said James E. Hansen, a leading climatologist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “Given our knowledge about what needs to be done to stabilize climate, this plan is like barging into a war without having a plan for how it should be conducted, even though information is available.
“We need a moratorium on coal now,” he added, “with phase-out of existing plants over the next two decades.”
Enel and many other electricity companies say they have little choice but to build coal plants to replace aging infrastructure, particularly in countries like Italy and Germany that have banned the building of nuclear power plants. Fuel costs have risen 151 percent since 1996, and Italians pay the highest electricity costs in Europe.
In terms of cost and energy security, coal has all the advantages, its proponents argue. Coal reserves will last for 200 years, rather than 50 years for gas and oil. Coal is relatively cheap compared with oil and natural gas, although coal prices have tripled in the past few years. More important, dozens of countries export coal — there is not a coal cartel — so there is more room to negotiate prices.
“In order to get over oil, which is getting more and more expensive, our plan is to convert all oil plants to coal using clean-coal technologies,” said Gianfilippo Mancini, Enel’s chief of generation and energy management. “This will be the cleanest coal plant in Europe. We are hoping to prove that it will be possible to make sustainable and environmentally friendly use of coal.”
“Clean coal” is a term coined by the industry decades ago, referring to its efforts to reduce local pollution. Using new technology, clean coal plants sharply reduced the number of sooty particles spewed into the air, as well as gases like sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide. The technology has minimal effect on carbon emissions.
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In fact, the technology that the industry is counting on to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions that add to global warning — carbon capture and storage — is not now commercially available. No one knows if it is feasible on a large, cost-effective scale.
The task — in which carbon emissions are pumped into underground reservoirs rather than released — is challenging for any fuel source, but particularly so for coal, which produces more carbon dioxide than oil or natural gas.
Under optimal current conditions, coal produces more than twice as much carbon dioxide per unit of electricity as natural gas, the second most common fuel used for electricity generation, according to the Electric Power Research Institute. In the developing world, where even new coal plants use lower grade coal and less efficient machinery, the equation is even worse.
Without carbon capture and storage, coal cannot be green. But solving that problem will take global coordination and billions of dollars in investment, which no one country or company seems inclined to spend, said Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University.
“Figuring out carbon capture is really critical — it may not work in the end — and if it is not viable, the situation, with respect to climate change, is far more dire,” Mr. Sachs said.
There are a few dozen small demonstration projects in Europe and in the United States, most in the early stages. But progress has not been promising.
At the end of January, the Bush administration canceled what was previously by far the United States’ biggest carbon-capture demonstration project, at a coal-fired plant in Illinois, because of huge cost overruns. The costs of the project, undertaken in 2003 with a budget of $950 million, had spiraled to $1.5 billion this year, and it was far from complete.
The European Union had pledged to develop 12 pilot carbon-capture projects for Europe, but says that is not enough.
Many have likened carbon capture’s road from the demonstration lab to a safe, cheap, available reality as a challenge equivalent to putting a man on the moon. Norway, which is investing heavily to test the technology, calls carbon capture its “moon landing.”
It may be even harder than that. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz
http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page1.aspx It is a moon landing that must be replicated daily at thousands of coal plants in hundreds of countries — many of them poor. There is a new coal-fired plant going up in India or China almost every week, and most of those are not constructed in a way that is amenable to carbon capture, even if it were developed.
Plants that could someday be adapted to carbon capture cost 10 to 20 percent more to build, and only a handful exist today. For most coal power plants the costs of converting would be “phenomenal,” concluded a report by the United States Environmental Protection Agency.
Then there is the problem of storing the carbon dioxide, which is at some level an inherently local issue. Geologists have to determine if there is a suitable underground site, calculate how much carbon dioxide it can hold and then equip it in a way that prevents leaks and ensures safety. A large leak of underground carbon dioxide could be as dangerous as a leak of nuclear fuel, critics say.
As for its plant here, Enel says it will start experimenting with carbon-capture technology in 2015, in the hopes of “a solution” by 2020.
“That’s too late,” Mr. Sachs said.
In the meantime, it and other new coal plants will be spewing more greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere than ever before, meaning that current climate predictions — dire as they are — may still be “too optimistic,” Mr. Sachs said. “They assume the old energy mix, even though coal will be a larger and larger part.”
On many other fronts, the new Enel plant is a model of efficiency and recycling. The nitrous oxide is chemically altered to generate ammonia, which is then sold. The resulting coal ash and gypsum are sold to the cement industry.
An on-site desalination plant means that the operation generates its own water for cooling. Even the heated water that comes out of the plant is not wasted: it heats a fish farm, one of Italy’s largest.
But Enel’s plan to deal with the new plant’s carbon emissions consists mostly of a map of Italy with several huge white ovals superimposed — subterranean cavities where carbon dioxide potentially could be stored.
The sites have not been fully studied by geologists as yet to make sure they are safe storage sites and well sealed. There is no infrastructure or equipment that could move carbon into them.
The new Enel plant here opens its first boiler in two months. It will immediately produce fewer carbon emissions than the ancient oil boiler it replaces, but only because it will produce less electricity, officials here admit. http://louis7j7sheehan7esquire.blogspot.com/
In the towns surrounding Civitavecchia, the impending arrival of a huge coal plant, with its three silvery domes, is being greeted with a hefty dose of dread.
“They call it clean coal because they use some filters, but it is really nonsense,” said Marza Marzioli of the No Coal citizens group in the nearby ancient Etruscan town of Tarquinia. “If you compare it to old plants, yes it’s better, but it’s not ‘clean’ in any way.”
The group says that Enel has won approval for a dangerous new coal plant by buying machines for a local hospital and by carrying out a public relations campaign. Enel advertisements for the project show a young girl erasing a plant’s smokestack.
Most people who took part in a 2007 local referendum voted no, but the plant went ahead anyway, the group said.
The European Union, through its emissions trading scheme, has tried to make power plants consider the costs of carbon, forcing them to buy “permits” for emissions. But with the price of oil so high, coal is far cheaper, even with the cost of permits to pollute factored in, Enel has calculated.
Stephan Singer, who runs the European energy and climate office of WWF, formerly the World Wildlife Fund, in Brussels, said that math was shortsighted: the cost of coal and permits will almost certainly rise over the next decade.
“If they want coal to be part of the energy solution, they have to show us that carbon capture can be done now, that they can really reduce emissions” to an acceptable level, Mr. Singer said.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
“They wouldn’t have given you a plugged nickel eight years ago that there would ever be a high-rise residential building in downtown Las Vegas,” Mr. Goodman said with a laugh. “It was unheard of.”
And Union Park is now desirable enough to be a bargaining chip. Next month, the City Council is expected to finalize a plan in which a developer will build a new $150 million City Hall in the older downtown area in exchange for a parcel in Union Park where a casino-hotel can be built.
Still, the enduring down-at-the-heels reputation of the old downtown was a factor in Mr. Palmer’s decision to build in Union Park instead of the old downtown. “I call it the new Las Vegas,” said Richard Femenella, chief financial officer of the Charlie Palmer Group. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/
“They say they’re revitalizing downtown, but truthfully, everything west of the railroad tracks is all brand new. It was dirt.”
Whether the old downtown is left behind is a concern of Linda Lera-Randle El, an activist for homeless people, who said that none of the residential units in Union Park were designated as affordable housing and that she worried that homeless people who squat on the vacant land would be displaced.
Not all of the mayor’s dreams have come to fruition. Several attempts to get a developer to build a sports arena, first at Union Park and then elsewhere, appear to have stalled. Mr. Goodman aggressively courted the Cleveland Clinic to take up residence, only to have the respected hospital pass. But the results of Union Park nonetheless stand to rewrite the national impression of Mr. Goodman as a Vegas caricature given to outlandish acts like suggesting that graffiti artists be de-thumbed or running a seminar on making martinis.
“I don’t always agree with Oscar, but I do think that Union Park is going to make it,” said a councilwoman, Lois Tarkanian, one of Mr. Goodman’s most vocal detractors.
“Even if you disagree with him on this or that,” Ms. Tarkanian said, “you have to give him credit for the part of his personality that can get this done.”
Joe Zealberg, a psychiatrist in Charleston, S.C., prescribed generic dOne day last week, David Jacobs took out two measuring cups, put a pot on the stove at his home here and demonstrated how he used to turn raw powder into steroids.
For more than a year, Jacobs operated a makeshift pharmaceutical lab out of his kitchen in his one-story suburban home. Each month, he said, he sold about a thousand of his own bottles of steroids and another thousand kits of human growth hormone smuggled from China to dealers across the United States. Among the dealers he supplied were two N.F.L. players, Jacobs said, who would then supply a handful of other N.F.L. players with the banned substances.
Jacobs’s business as one of the largest steroid producers in Texas came to a halt in April 2007 when federal agents raided his home and confiscated thousands of units of steroids. Later, as part of Operation Raw Deal, a nationwide investigation of the importation and distribution of performance-enhancing drugs, he pleaded guilty to conspiring to distribute anabolic steroids. http://louis-j-sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx
On Thursday in Sherman, Tex., Jacobs was sentenced to three years of probation.
Jacobs, a former body builder, said he advised about 10 N.F.L. players on how to exploit loopholes in the league’s drug-testing program. One way, he said, was to have team doctors write them prescriptions for drugs that would mask steroid use.
Jacobs’s case received national attention because a Web site for his supplements store boasted of providing counseling to several players on the Dallas Cowboys and the Atlanta Falcons.
The New York Times reported last month that information from the government’s investigation of Jacobs had led federal prosecutors to investigate Matt Lehr, an offensive lineman for the New Orleans Saints, on the suspicion he distributed performance-enhancing drugs. In recent years, investigators have focused largely on the distributors of drugs, not athletes or other users.
Lehr’s lawyer has denied that his client ever sold steroids or H.G.H. and said Jacobs fabricated information about Lehr after he refused to pay Jacobs’s legal fees. Jacobs said he never asked Lehr to give him money for legal expenses.
In interviews here last week, Jacobs said he sold hundreds of bottles of steroids and H.G.H. to Lehr and another N.F.L. player. Those players, Jacobs said, sold the substances to other players in 2006 and 2007.
“I thought the fewer the people I was selling to, the safer it would be,” Jacobs said. “There were many players who wanted drugs, but I didn’t want to have direct transactions with a bunch of people.”
Lehr tested positive and was suspended for four games in 2006 for testing positive for steroids, but he has not been charged in this case.
Jacobs said he advised players, including Lehr, to ask their team doctors to write them prescriptions for finasteride, a drug used to treat balding in young men. http://louis-j-sheehan.us/
Jacobs said a Falcons team doctor wrote Lehr a prescription for the substance. He said a bottle of finasteride labeled as prescribed for Lehr was seized from his own house in April 2007.
“The excuse they did it under was that the players were losing their hair because they were taking their helmets on and off,” Jacobs said, echoing similar statements that were published Sunday in The Dallas Morning News.
The N.F.L. does not test for the substance, and it is not on its list of banned substances.
“We do not comment on any medical procedures or information about any of our players,” Reggie Roberts, a spokesman for the Falcons, said in a telephone interview.
Greg Aiello, a spokesman for the N.F.L., said the league’s independent scientific and medical advisers reviewed finasteride before and after it was banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency in 2005, but recommended that it not be banned.
Don Catlin, the head of the independent organization Anti-Doping Research, said in a telephone interview that finasteride could mask the use of some substances normally detected through urine testing.
Jacobs, who said he stopped using steroids in April 2007, said he also advised players to use steroids only in the off-season.
“The players know the testing is tougher in-season, so they use human growth hormone year round and only use steroids in the off-season,” he said.
The N.F.L. tests its players year round for steroids but does not test players for H.G.H. Of the 12,000 tests the league performs, 4,000 are in the off-season.
Jacobs said he suggested that players say they were out of town or on vacation with their wives when they received phone calls about pending drug tests.
He also said he would then provide the player with an herbal supplement intended to cleanse the system of steroids without being detected.
“A week later, they would be tested and they would pass,” Jacobs said.
Under the World Anti-Doping Agency rules, which apply to Olympic athletes, three missed tests by one athlete within 18 months can result in a suspension for the athlete.
Aiello said players had to provide the league’s drug tester with their off-season locations and a number where they could be reached at all times.
“The program’s independent adviser has the full authority to determine if a player is evading testing in violation of the program and makes a determination on a case-by-case basis,” Aiello said.
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After his sentencing Thursday, Jacobs said he was willing to cooperate with N.F.L. officials, who had reached out to him several months ago to learn more about his dealings with league players.
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“I plan to travel to New York in the next month to meet with them and tell them about the loopholes in their program,” Jacobs said.
As for whether he intends to share names with the league, Jacobs said, “Only if the N.F.L. guarantees their lives won’t be destroyed like mine.” http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page.aspx
rugs to patients for years and rarely had problems -- until last year. A number of patients who had done very well on brand-name medications "crashed and burned" when they switched to generics, he says.
One woman "went from being perfectly fine to crying inconsolably 24 hours a day" after she switched from one generic antidepressant to another, Dr. Zealberg says. Another patient was sold a generic version of his attention-deficit drug that contained no identifying markings whatsoever -- a violation of federal rules.
Ten of his patients switched to a new generic version of the antidepressant Wellbutrin, but eight of them changed back, saying they felt anxious or shaky or their depression had returned. Several complained that the generic drug had a bad smell, he says.
Generic medications have been a boon to consumers around the world, allowing millions to buy lifesaving drugs for pennies a day. http://louis2j2sheehan.blogspot.com/
Some 65% of all prescriptions dispensed in the U.S. are for generics, though they account for only 20% of the dollars spent, according to the Generic Pharmaceutical Association.
While there is no hard evidence of growing problems from generics, consumers and physicians are increasingly concerned as cost pressures push more patients away from brand-name drugs. At the same time, the globalization of pharmaceutical manufacturing has revealed regulatory lapses.
By law, generics must have the same active ingredient and the same action as the brand-name version, which allows them to piggyback on the original safety and efficacy trials. But generics do have different inactive ingredients, which can affect how they are absorbed into the body. Generics can produce blood levels as much as 20% below or 25% above that of the original drug and still be considered "bioequivalent," according to Food and Drug Administration guidelines.
Some patients are more sensitive to those differences than others, and people who experience problems with medications are advised to contact their doctors, the drug manufacturer and the FDA's MedWatch.
Wellbutrin, made by Biovail Corp. of Canada and marketed by GlaxoSmithKline PLC, is one of the best-selling antidepressants in the U.S., with sales of $1.8 billion in 2006. The FDA approved a generic version of Wellbutrin XL 300, a long-acting once-daily version, in December 2006. The generic, named Budeprion XL 300, soon accounted for roughly 40% of the one million monthly prescriptions for the antidepressant.
But patients soon started logging complaints about Budeprion at PeoplesPharmacy.com, a Web site that has become a clearinghouse for medication gripes. "We've received hundreds of complaints about generic drugs in general. But with this one drug, all of a sudden -- kaboom -- right after it was approved," says Joe Graedon, a pharmacologist who runs People's Pharmacy with his wife. Readers' postings cite side effects such as tremors, headaches, anxiety and sleep disturbances. Some consumers said their depression had returned, in some cases bringing thoughts of suicide. Many reported that their adverse effects stopped when they returned to the brand-name drug.
Mr. Graedon alerted the FDA. He also asked ConsumerLab.com, which normally runs tests for dietary supplement manufacturers, to compare Budeprion and Wellbutrin. Using a test-tube test that some industry experts question, ConsumerLab found that Budeprion dissolves faster, releasing 34% of the drug within the first two hours, compared with 8% for Wellbutrin.
"If you get four times the drug in the first two hours, that's too much drug in the beginning and not enough for the rest of the day," says Mr. Graedon, who worries that what he calls "dose dumping" could cause seizures, a concern with the brand-name drug as well.
Complaints about Budeprion also were coming into the FDA -- at least 130 from December 2006 to January 2008, according to Andy Georgiades of Dow Jones News Service, who filed a Freedom of Information Act request. http://louis1j1sheehan.blogspot.com/
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Only four complaints were filed about two rival generic versions of Wellbutrin XL 300 that went on the market in June 2007.
The FDA conducted an investigation and reported last week that although there were "small differences" between the two formulations, "they are not outside the established boundaries for equivalence." The generic did reach its maximum blood concentration in two to three hours, compared to five to six hours for Wellbutrin, but the FDA said those differences "were not considered clinically significant."
What accounted for the consumer complaints? The FDA cited "the natural history of depression," in which some patients have a recurrence of symptoms even while on medication.
HOW TO REPORT DRUG PROBLEMS
• If you have a bad reaction to a drug or concerns about quality, your first stop should be your doctor, who can file a medical report with the FDA.
• You can also submit a consumer report to the FDA's MedWatch program at www.fda.gov/MedWatch3. You will be asked to describe the medication, the adverse event and some brief medical history. Your identity isn't requested. If you supply an email address, you will receive confirmation that your report was received. You can also speak to an FDA representative at 1-888-INFO-FDA .
• Contact the manufacturer or distributor. The FDA requires prescription and over-the-counter drugs to list contact information on the packaging.
• Return the medication to the pharmacist; use one you know and trust.
• www.PeoplesPharmacy.com4 also logs complaints about generic drugs, but these aren't counted as official FDA adverse-event reports.
Some critics say the FDA, in effect, was saying, "it's all in their heads." But they were more alarmed to read in the report that the FDA relied on tests comparing a lower dose of Wellbutrin and Budeprion -- 150 mg -- when it first approved the 300 mg version in 2006, and didn't have specific bioequivalence data on the 300 mg dose that had generated the complaints.
"Everybody involved in this whole chain -- pharmacists, physicians, insurance companies, drug-store buyers -- assumes the FDA approves every single generic formulation to prove that it isn't harmful," says Mr. Graedon. http://members.greenpeace.org/blog/purposeforporpoise
"We learned last week that that's not the case."
The FDA explained that it didn't want to expose test subjects to the risk of seizures with the 300 mg dose. Bioequivalence tests are conducted on healthy people, not those who need the medication, and each gets just a single dose, so there is no chance to work up to 300 mg slowly, as actual patients are advised to do. Sandy Walsh, an FDA spokeswoman, says this is common procedure for testing antidepressants and antipsychotics.
"If we see scientific evidence that a product is not performing as expected, we will take action," Ms. Walsh says. "The FDA cannot offer examples where generics have not performed as expected because there have been none for the agency to report."
Deborah Jaskot, vice president for regulatory affairs at Teva Pharmaceuticals USA, which distributes Budeprion, says the ConsumerLab dissolution test was an invalid comparison, and that on all the accepted tests, Budeprion performed within the range of bioequivalence with Wellbutrin. Teva itself has received 101 reports of problems with Budeprion -- out of 4.5 million prescriptions written -- and hasn't heard reports of unusual smells, a spokeswoman says.
Ms. Jaskot also says Web sites that collect complaints about drugs "are doing the public a disservice." If consumers have problems with their medications they should "tell their physician, tell the manufacturer, tell the pharmacists, tell the FDA -- that's the only way these can get acted on and evaluated for veracity," she says.
But what if you complain to the FDA and are told, in effect, that your concerns are insignificant? As with so many other areas in health care, consumers have to be their own regulator and their own chief advocate.
"Consumers need to know that there are variations between generic drugs and brand-name drugs, and from one generic drug to another," says Wayne Pines, a former FDA spokesman who now consults for drug companies. "This is an area in which the patient has to be really self-protective, to be sure that they are getting the therapeutic effect that is best for them."
If you are taking a medication for a long-term condition, Mr. Pines advises staying with the version you are stabilized on. Some pharmacies sell generic versions interchangeably; tell your pharmacist you want to stay with the same one.
If you need to switch to a generic from a brand name for cost reasons, monitor your symptoms and review them with your doctor. Assess whether it's worth it to you to pay more. (There are some medications, particularly for thyroid and blood conditions, in which substitutions are never advised.)
The Graedons also recommend asking for copies of your lab reports, so you can help your doctor monitor any changes in your condition.
Be alert to changes in smell or appearance of your medications. Tell your doctor, pharmacist and the manufacturer if you notice anything odd.
Dr. Zealberg, however, is still waiting to hear back from the pharmacy that sold his patient blank pills.
The robot will see you now. At least in the operating room, where more and more often robots stand between doctor and patient, the New York Times reports. http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US
At many hospitals robots, under the control of doctors, are performing some of the precision work of prostate and gynecological surgery. In their favor, robots’ “hands” don’t shake, don’t tire and can make precise cuts in tiny places. Robots don’t care about X-ray exposure or need days off either.
But how well are medical robots complying with the Three Laws of Robotics as codified by the late sci-fi author and Health Blog hero Isaac Asimov? Let’s take a look at Intuitive Surgical’s da Vinci robot, featured prominently in the NYT’s piece.
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Robots aren’t perfect, but, let’s face it, neither are humans. A quick check of the FDA’s database of problems reported for medical devices turns up a few, but not a ton, of complaints about the da Vinci. Among the recent ones, the robotic scissors in a prostate surgery case malfunctioned, filling the O.R. with the smell of garlic, but the patient wasn’t harmed.
Some fatalities were reported to the FDA recently, but it wasn’t clear they were related to the robot, such as the death of a hysterectomy patient from sepsis four days after surgery.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
Again, the FDA database shows a few cases of an obstinate or malfunctioning robot, but not a revolution of machines against their masters. One user reported to the FDA that a flurry of error codes led a surgeon to abort a robot-assisted prostate procedure and continue the old-fashioned way last year–no harm to the patient. Intuitive Surgical, maker of the robot, later fixed the device, the report said.
Another report says one of the robot’s arms stopped working during a cardiac procedure. The surgeon made another incision to insert another instrument to complete the operation, but a re-boot of the machine by a company rep revived the robotic arm. The surgeon completed the operation without the robot balking again.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Robots are thriving, and their survival instincts appear strong. Despite the da Vinci price tag of about $1.3 million, on average, “it is rapidly becoming unusual for a urologist to operate without using one,” the Times reports.
Rather than conflicting with the first two laws, the robots may be bumping into the iron law of hospital profitability. Health technology consultant Winifred Hayes tells the Times that most hospitals and clinics are losing money or not making much on their investments in robots. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
“The real story is that this is a technology that has been disseminated fairly widely prematurely,” she adds.
It was like a college mixer, a classroom full of young men and women seeking a recipe for romance.
They had assembled for the first class of “Love Relations for Life: A Journey of Romance, Love and Sexuality.”
There was giggling and banter among the students, but that was all part of the course as their teacher, Suki Tong, led them into the basics of dating, falling in love and staying together.
The course, in its second year at two polytechnic institutes, is the latest of many, mostly futile, campaigns by Singapore’s government to get its citizens to mate and multiply. Its popularity last year has led to talk of its expansion through the higher education system.
“We want to tell students, ‘Don’t wait until you have built up your career,’ ” said Yu-Foo Yee Shoon, the minister of state for community development, youth and sports, at a news conference in March. “Sometimes, it is too late, especially for girls.”
The courses are an extension of government matchmaking programs that try to address the twin challenges embodied in a falling birthrate: too few people are having babies, and too few of those who are belong to what Singapore considers the genetically desirable educated elite.
Over the past 25 years, the mating rituals organized by the government — tea dances, wine tastings, cooking classes, cruises, screenings of romantic movies — have been among the country’s least successful social engineering programs.
Last year Singapore’s fertility rate fell to a record low of 1.24 children per woman of childbearing age, one of the lowest in the world. It was the 28th year in a row Singapore had stayed below the rate of 2.5 children needed to maintain the population.
But even a replacement-level rate would not be enough for today’s planners. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/page1.aspx
The government recently announced that it was aiming to increase the population by more than 40 percent over the next half-century, to 6.5 million from the current 4.5 million.
“Teaching our youth in school how to fall in love” is a good solution, wrote Andy Ho, a senior writer at The Straits Times, a government-friendly newspaper that does its best to help out in Singapore’s many campaigns.
In 1991, for example, when the government began offering cash bonuses to couples with more than two children, the newspaper printed tips for having sex in the back seat of a car, including directions to some of the “darkest, most secluded and most romantic spots” for parking.
It suggested covering the windows with newspapers for privacy.
Singapore is known for its campaigns of self-improvement, including efforts to get residents to be polite, to smile, to be tidy, to speak proper English and to not chew gum.
In 1984, the country’s master planner, Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, declared that too few of the country’s most eligible women, those with college degrees, were marrying and having children. He set up the Social Development Unit to address the problem, and since then the government has been the country’s principal matchmaker.
In addition to its tea dances and moonlight cruises, the agency acts as a lonely hearts adviser, with an online counselor named Dr. Love and a menu of boy-meets-girl suggestions on its Web site, www.lovebyte.org.sg.
“Guys, girls notice everything!” the Web site offers in one of its dating tips. “Comb your hair differently and they notice. Change your watch and they notice! Skipped your morning shower and sprayed on deodorant to cover the smell — they notice! What does this mean? Well, bathe regularly, change something about yourself, be observant, and compliment the lady.”
Mr. Lee himself acknowledged how silly some of this may seem.
“Never mind the hullabaloo in the press, all the foreign correspondents writing that a crackpot government is trying to interfere in people’s lives,” he said when he inaugurated the Social Development Unit. “If we continue to reproduce ourselves in this lopsided way, we will be unable to maintain our present standards.”
In other words, said Annie Chan, director of a matchmaking agency, “Our government wants smart ladies to meet smart guys to get smart children.”
But in Singapore it is impossible to get very far from thoughts of money and the workplace. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/page1.aspx
These guys may have other things on their minds besides romance and babies.
“Some people say if you’re a smart guy you should marry a smart woman who can help you with your finances and career,” said Ms. Chan, whose agency is called Club2040 and who has worked under contract for the Social Development Unit.
Singaporeans quite seriously describe their society as being driven by a local concept called kiasu, a desire not so much to get ahead as to not lose out. That concept might be applied, for example, to a person who pushes ahead of everybody else to get into an elevator.
This single-mindedness, in life as in elevators, seems to leave little room for social graces or for romance or procreation.
“The E.Q. here,” said Ms. Chan, referring to an emotional quotient of social skills, “can be appalling.”
But even while working on the solution, Ms. Chan seems to be part of the problem. She is 39 and has been married for four years, but said she did not have the time or energy to have children.
It is a lot to ask of a college course to break attitudes like this. Three 20-year-old graduates of last year’s inaugural course at Singapore Polytechnic still seemed imbued more with kiasu than romance.
Despite everything their teachers had told them about multitasking work and love, none was in a relationship. And nothing they had heard in class seemed to have dented their stereotypes about the opposite sex.
“I’m not open to relationships in school,” said Wei Shan Koh, a former student who works as a teacher’s aide. “Boys in school are not my cup of tea. They are male chauvinist pigs. They’re annoying and childish. And they won’t give in to you. They’re just not mature.”
Another former student, Tian Xi Tang, was quick to respond.
“I think girls’ ideas are a bit childish, or you might say girlie,” said Mr. Tian, who hopes to become an engineer. “It’s a matter of pride. Guys are more outspoken. We don’t like a girl to be more outspoken.”
Kamal Prakash, who hopes to be a lecturer in mathematics, gave voice to what appears to be the common theme here, among both young people and their elders.
“I am not interested now in love relations because I want to continue my studies,” he said. “If I concentrate on love relations, I won’t be able to concentrate on my studies.”
With his Mercedes-Benz and his fine clothes, Josef Fritzl looked every inch a property owner, neighbors in this tidy Austrian town said Monday. Even when running errands, they said, he wore a natty jacket, crisp shirt and tie.
Mr. Fritzl’s apartment house, its back garden obscured by a tall hedge, was his kingdom, one neighbor said, and interlopers were not welcome. On Monday, investigators in white jumpsuits combed the house and garden for clues. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
The authorities said Sunday that Mr. Fritzl, 73, had kept one of his daughters imprisoned for 24 years in a basement dungeon, where she bore him seven children.
The daughter, Elisabeth, now 42, is in psychiatric care, along with two of her children. Her eldest daughter, Kerstin, 19, who was also kept in the basement and whose illness pulled apart Mr. Fritzl’s secret after he had her taken to a local hospital, was in a medically induced coma and was in critical condition, the authorities said.
The authorities said Mr. Fritzl confessed Monday to imprisonment, sexual abuse and incest. The case has left this town of 22,000 people, 80 miles west of Vienna, in stunned disbelief. Neighbors milled around the three-story apartment building on Monday, watching the investigation unfold and asking how such an atrocity could have occurred in their midst.
“One cannot comprehend the dimension of this,” said Doris Bichler, 34, a neighbor who was walking with her daughter. “Natascha Kampusch was bad, but this is of a totally different scale.” Ms. Bichler was referring to the notorious kidnapping of an Austrian schoolgirl, who was hidden in a windowless cellar for eight years until she escaped in August 2006. Until now, the Kampusch case was considered by many as the epitome of depravity in the post-World War II history of this country.
But as details of this latest case filter out, it seems even harder to fathom than Ms. Kampusch’s abduction, involving nearly a quarter-century of confinement and sexual abuse, and the birth of seven children, three of whom never emerged from the cellar into daylight until last week.
It also raises a troubling question: Why did two such horrifying crimes occur in the same period in Austria, known as a tranquil, picture-book land?
There seems no easy answer — and Austrian officials, while insisting that similar crimes had occurred in other countries, said they were struggling to make sense of Mr. Fritzl’s singular misdeeds.
“He was man of stature,” Franz Polzer, the chief of the criminal investigations unit for the Province of Lower Austria, said at a news conference here, holding up a photograph of Mr. Fritzl, a heavyset, gray-haired man dressed in black.
“He led a double life,” Mr. Polzer continued, “with one family of seven children, with his wife, and a second family of seven children, with his daughter.”
The police described Mr. Fritzl as an authoritarian figure who had brooked no dissent.
Trained as an electrician and an engineer, Mr. Fritzl owns the small apartment building, renting out a few apartments and living on the top floor. Over many years, he built an underground world for his captives in a warren of cramped, windowless rooms. He provided them with food and clothing, bought outside town to avoid suspicion.
Photographs show a miniature bathroom, finished with tile and wood trim on the ceiling. A claustrophobic passageway leads to a bedroom. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/page1.aspx
The chamber was accessible through a four-foot-high door that opened with a remote-control device, for which only Mr. Fritzl held the code.
The police said his wife, Rosemarie, 68, had no inkling of his secret life, believing that their daughter had fled the family for a cult and was unable to take care of her children. Mr. Fritzl forced Elisabeth to give up three of the children as babies, and he and his wife raised them. A seventh child, a twin boy, died soon after being born; Mr. Fritzl told the police he threw the body in an incinerator, the authorities said.
“You have to imagine that this woman’s world fell apart,” a local official, Hans-Heinz Lenze, said of Rosemarie.
At the news conference, officials came under sharp questioning about how the situation could have remained unknown to the authorities. After Mr. Fritzl and his wife began taking care of Elisabeth’s children, social workers visited their home several times.
Officials defended themselves hotly, saying that if Mr. Fritzl was able to keep his wife ignorant of his crimes when she lived upstairs from the cellar, how could outsiders have guessed?
Neighbors expressed similar bafflement.
“You’re amazed that something like this could happen in your neighborhood,” said Günther Pramreiter, who runs a bakery next door to the Fritzls’ building. He said the couple, or their adopted children, came in every other day to buy rolls.
By most accounts, the three children who grew up in the Fritzls’ care were well-adjusted, each learning to play a musical instrument.
Karl Dattinger, 20, a volunteer firefighter, recalls that one of the daughters, Monika, had received a perfect score on a test of fire safety he gave at their school.
Matthias Sonnleitner, who manages a hardware store, said his children had taken martial arts classes with the Fritzl children. Rosemarie Fritzl occasionally came to his store to buy curtains, he said.
Even two of the three children imprisoned in the cellar were surprisingly healthy, if pale, according to the authorities. Elisabeth taught them to speak German, and they had access to a television.
The television played a key role in untangling the case, the police said. After the 19-year-old, Kerstin, was taken to the hospital, authorities appealed for her mother to come forward. Elisabeth saw the broadcast and persuaded her father to release her and the other two children living with her. Officials declined to give a prognosis for Kerstin.
Among people in the Fritzls’ neighborhood, there was a disquieting sense that more could have been done.
“I think the authorities are overworked and weren’t able to follow up every lead,” said Franz Jandl, 50, who owns a shop across the street from the apartment. “For a little country, to have this kind of thing happen a second time is a catastrophe. It’s just very sad.”
Spain's National Court has decided against extraditing the former Argentine president María Estela Martínez de Perón, 77, to Argentina, where she is wanted on charges of human rights abuses during her presidency in the 1970s. In two rulings, the court said that the charges did not constitute crimes against humanity and that the statute of limitations for the offenses of which Ms. Perón, known as Isabelita, is accused expired after 20 years. The rulings may be appealed. Ms. Perón was the third wife of Gen. Juan Domingo Perón and vice president when he died in 1974. She then led the country for two tumultuous years before being deposed in a military coup. She has lived in Spain since 1981.
The number of people traveling the globe for medical treatment likely is far lower than commonly assumed, but there remains potential for huge growth in the industry, according to a study by consulting firm McKinsey & Co.
Just 60,000 to 85,000 patients a year travel to another country expressly for inpatient hospital care each year, according to the study, which is scheduled for release Tuesday. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/
http://louis-j-sheehan.com/Moreover, most aren't seeking low-cost care in the developing world, the phenomenon that has garnered considerable attention lately. Instead, many of the medical tourists seek the latest treatments available in the U.S. and other industrialized countries.
The consulting firm analyzed the behavior of nearly 50,000 patients using data from unidentified hospitals around the world, as well as government travel records and other information. The researchers also interviewed patients and hospital officials. They estimate the sample amounted to 60% to 80% of the world-wide market.
The figure contrasts sharply with those often used by medical-tourism marketers -- one said Asia attracts 1.3 million medical tourists a year -- and anecdotal accounts. "There's been an enormous amount of hype," said Paul Mango, who heads McKinsey's health-care practice. However, he noted that the report estimates that the eventual market for Americans seeking cheaper care abroad at perhaps 710,000 procedures a year.
The Medical Tourism Association, a trade group in West Palm Beach, Fla., that represents hospitals, travel agents and brokers, among others, avoids trying to quantify the industry's size precisely because there is no consistent definition of medical tourism, said Chief Operating Officer Renee-Marie Stephano. And, citing the complexity of collecting comprehensive data, she cautioned that McKinsey's numbers are likely to be similarly flawed because they involve only a sample of facilities and look at hospital admissions. "A large portion of the medical-tourism industry is based in cosmetic procedures and dental care, which are not performed in hospitals," Ms. Stephano said.
To arrive at its estimate, Mr. Mango's team focused on patients traveling expressly for inpatient hospital care and excluded several categories that the consultants said were commonly included in higher estimates. Those include expatriates seeking treatment in the countries where they live, tourists seeking unexpected medical attention, and some patients traveling short distances across borders for care not available nearby in their own country.
About 40% of "medical travelers" identified in the report are patients, largely in developing countries, seeking top-notch medical care, primarily in the U.S. Another 32% sought better care than was available at home. About 15% sought to circumvent waiting times at home, particularly in Canada and the United Kingdom, Mr. Mango said.
Americans and others seeking lower-cost care for medically necessary procedures accounted for about 9% of the total, the consultants estimate. http://louis-j-sheehan.org/
Elective procedures such as cosmetic surgery accounted for about 4%.
Still, much of the growth potential lies in patients seeking cheaper care in the developing world, the report concludes. It estimates that about 710,000 procedures a year -- procedures that currently bring $35 billion of revenue -- could be done overseas at a savings of about $15,000 a procedure.
But about 80% are likely to continue to be more cost-effective to perform in the U.S. Most Americans seeking cheaper care overseas now are uninsured, and Mr. Mango said the "No. 1 factor" is whether insurers, employers and the government will begin encouraging foreign treatment.
Some people want a little more out of their vacation than a fruity drink served poolside. Diving with sharks in South Africa, for example. Or living among penguins for five days in Antarctica. Or paddling in a canoe down a crocodile- and hippopotamus-infested river in Zambia.
For those people, the travel company Abercrombie & Kent has created a series called Extreme Adventures. Starting next fall, 15 adventure packages will be available in countries that range from Norway to Kenya to Nepal, featuring activities that include hiking, dog sledding, bungee jumping and cross-country skiing.
The first trip is scheduled for Sept. 28 through Oct. 6 and will take participants on foot through the Selous Game Reserve, a nature sanctuary and Unesco World Heritage site in Tanzania with elephants, black rhinoceroses, cheetahs and giraffes (from $9,830 a person, including airfare).
Egyptians mostly ignored the April 8 local elections to fill 52,000 places on municipal and village councils. Seventy percent of the seats were earmarked for [Hosni Mubarak]'s National Democratic Party because they were "uncontested." Mubarak's son, Gamal, happens to head the NDP.
Recalling the failed policies of the Shah of Iran, Mubarak has defeated the non-Islamist opposition, leaving the Muslim Brotherhood as the only credible voice of reform. This is the same toxic movement, founded in 1928, whose world-view spawned al-Qaida and Hamas. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/page1.aspx
It wants Shari'a law imposed in Egypt and relations with Israel broken off. Prudently, the Brotherhood eschews violent revolution, patiently waiting for power to fall into its hands. Despite Mubarak's machinations, Brotherhood- supported "independent" candidates captured 20% of the 454- seat parliament.
How well the regime feeds, clothes and employs its population, how swiftly it creates a civil society and system of representative government should be of foremost concern to Israel. Mubarak is mistaken in emasculating the moderate opposition, misguided in trying to "out-Islam" the Brotherhood by persecuting homosexuals. He is wide off the mark in allowing Egypt's media to demonize Jews and Israel. It took him too long to realize that letting Hamas bleed Israel was ultimately not in Cairo's interest.
American International Group joined the ranks of the credit crisis's biggest losers Thursday, reporting a $7.81 billion first-quarter loss and announcing plans to raise $12.5 billion in fresh capital as losses on complex securities soared.
The insurer said profits were hurt by a $9.11 billion hit on its portfolio of derivatives sold to hedge securities that have plunged in value and $6.82 billion in losses on investments. AIG reported another $6.82 billion in impairments that for accounting reasons only showed up on its balance sheet.
The blows brought AIG's total write-downs and losses from the credit crisis to more than $30 billion, with another $9 billion-plus in damage just to the balance sheet, putting the insurer in the same league as UBS AG, Citigroup Inc. and Merrill Lynch & Co.
The massive losses spooked investors and could deal a blow to optimists who have bet the worst of the crisis has passed.
The cost of protecting AIG's bonds against default soared after the announcement, and the insurer's shares plunged 8.7% to $40.30 in after hours trading. Standard & Poor's cut its credit rating on AIG one notch to AA- and put it on watch for a further downgrade.
"Although we expected that AIG would have some losses in the first quarter, the level of the additional losses exceeds these expectations," S&P analyst Rodney Clark said in a release.
The insurance company reported a net loss of $7.81 billion, or $3.09 a share, compared with year-earlier net income of $4.13 billion, or $1.58 a share. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/
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Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters were expecting a much smaller loss of 76 cents a share.
To repair the hole opened by the losses, AIG on Thursday launched a $7.5 billion offering of common stock and other equity securities. Another offering of hybrid securities will follow later. AIG had a market capitalization of $110.19 billion at the close of trading Thursday.
Even as it sought more capital to repair its balance sheet, AIG raised its quarterly dividend 10%, to 22 cents a share.
"While we anticipated a difficult trading environment, the severity of the unrealized valuation losses and decline in value of our investments were beyond our expectations," CEO Martin Sullivan said in a release.
AIG has multiple exposures to the housing crisis, and results were weak across the board. Its financial-products unit manages its derivatives portfolio of credit default swaps written on collateralized debt obligations backed by residential mortgages. The financial services unit swung to an operating loss of $8.77 billion in the first quarter from a profit of $292 million a year earlier.
The company's asset management unit posted an operating loss of $1.25 billion versus profits of $758 million a year ago amid losses on hedges, lower investment returns and depreciation expenses related to real estate investments acquired late last year.
The life insurance unit swung to an operating loss of $1.83 billion from a profit of $2.28 billion on hedging losses and damage to investment income from "volatile capital markets." Operating income in AIG's big general insurance operations fell 57% to $1.34 billion.
Representative Vito J. Fossella, a Staten Island Republican who was arrested on May 1 in Alexandria, Va., and charged with drunken driving, issued a statement on Thursday acknowledging that he had had an extramarital affair with Laura Fay, a former Air Force lieutenant colonel, and that the two of them have a 3-year-old daughter together.
The prospect that Mr. Fossella could face a mandatory jail sentence if convicted had already threatened to bring to an end his decade-long career in the House, where Mr. Fossella is the only Republican representing New York City. The Daily News has reported that Mr. Fossella called Ms. Fay for help after his arrest and told officers that he was on his way to Grimm Street, where Ms. Fay lives, to visit a sick daughter. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
As speculation swirled over Mr. Fossella’s relationship with Ms. Fay in recent days, his aides said only that they were good friends.
In Mr. Fossella’s four-sentence statement on Thursday, he declined to address his political future or specify whether he would seek re-election this fall to a sixth full term:
I have had a relationship with Laura Fay, with whom I have a three-year-old daughter. My personal failings and imperfections have caused enormous pain to the people I love and I am truly sorry. While I understand that there will be many questions, including those about my political future, making any political decisions right now are furthest from my mind. Over the coming weeks and months, I will to continue to do my job and I will work hard to heal the deep wounds I have caused.
Mr. Fossella, 43, was driving with a blood-alcohol level more than twice the legal limit when he was pulled over. He faces a mandatory five days in jail if convicted. The House ethics committee also could open an investigation into the matter.
Mr. Fossella, the only Republican member of Congress from New York City, has apologized to his constituents on Staten Island and in Brooklyn, but already, there is speculation that his decadelong career in the House could come to an end. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/page1.aspx
After serving three years in the City Council, he was elected to the House in a November 1997 special election to replace Susan Molinari.
In 2006, Mr. Fossella’s Democratic opponent, Stephen Harrison, a Brooklyn lawyer, fared better than any previous opponent, winning 43 percent of the vote.
This year, Mr. Harrison and another Democrat, City Councilman Domenic M. Recchia Jr. of Brooklyn, are in a primary race to challenge Mr. Fossella. Democrats in Washington said the fact that there were two candidates they called credible seeking to challenge Mr. Fossella underscored his vulnerability this year. The Democrats currently hold a 235-to-199 edge in the House, with one vacancy.
If Mr. Fossella resigns or declines to seek re-election, several other Republicans might run to replace him and keep the seat in the party’s hands. They include the Staten Island district attorney, Daniel M. Donovan Jr.; City Councilmen James S. Oddo and Vincent M. Ignizio; and State Senator Andrew J. Lanza.
The Staten Island Advance quoted Guy V. Molinari, a Republican power broker on Staten Island and a former congressman and borough president and mentor of Mr. Fossella’s, as saying, “Vito is going through a very difficult time. I will be by his side regardless of what decisions he makes.” (Mr. Molinari is the father of Susan Molinari and held the House seat himself, from 1981 to 1989.)
Born on Staten Island on March 9, 1965, Mr. Fossella is the son of a construction engineer and a florist and the fourth of seven children. He attended Monsignor Farrell High School and graduated from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1987. He received a law degree from Fordham University in 1994, the same year he was elected to the City Council. Mr. Fossella’s great-grandfather James A. O’Leary, a Democrat, represented Staten Island in the House from 1935 until his death in 1944.
Mr. Fossella and his wife, the former Mary Patricia Rowan, married in 1990. They have two sons and a daughter. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/
On Wednesday, Mr. Fossella attended a confirmation ceremony for his oldest child, Dylan, at St. Clare’s Roman Catholic Church in the Great Kills neighborhood of Staten Island, before returning to Washington.
After the 2004 tsunami smashed into South Asia, thousands of the dead awaited identification for weeks and even months. http://louis-j-sheehan.org/
The more time passed, the harder it became to identify the victims, let alone determine their age.
In the wake of a similar catastrophe, however, a new technique may help us learn victims' ages by analyzing the crystalline proteins in their eyes. The proteins form in the lens of the eye during the first two years of life, remaining unchanged thereafter. For anyone born in the last six decades, moreover, the lens proteins carry a radioactive marker—a special signature reflecting the pattern of nuclear bomb tests starting in 1955 and declining at an exponential rate since 1963.
"We're always on the lookout for methods of improving our ways to identify corpses," says Niels Lynnerup, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Copenhagen, who developed the technique based on levels of carbon-14. A rare radioactive isotope whose levels were boosted by radiation emitted by the bomb tests, carbon-14 leaves an imprint on plant cells and, by extension, the animals that eat them. While carbon-14 accumulates in tissue like skin or muscle, these cells undergo constant turnover. http://louis-j-sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx
The eye lens proteins, on the other hand, are unchanging, making them an ideal indicator for date of birth.
To validate the new technology, eye pathologist Steffen Heegaard sliced out the lenses of 13 deceased people born between 1922 and 1991; then the team extracted the carbon, placed samples in a mass spectrometer, and counted the number of carbon-14 atoms in each.
From these results, Lynnerup constructed a mathematical model that would enable him to calculate the age of any unidentified corpse. The research has other practical applications as well: The method could be used to chart the course of Alzheimer's disease or some types of slow-growing cancers, which lay down protein plaques that subsist for decades unaltered.
Sleeping on the floor of the Congolese jungle with only a tarp beneath her, herpetologist Kate Jackson dreams of “a luxurious palace, with soft couches and thick carpets, and filled with snakes of many different species.” Catching reptiles and amphibians for the Smithsonian Institution is no tropical holiday—her hired guide sulks and occasionally fails to show up, her cook endlessly prepares macaroni and canned pork, and worst of all, her nets often turn up empty. But each day she optimistically wades hip-deep through the flooded forest in hopes of capturing a magnificent water cobra or a new venomous snake. “The sense of living things interacting, humming all around me, is palpable,” Jackson writes. And she immerses herself in that ecosystem.
When a Grayia strikes at her from the net, she lets it bite—proving once and for all to her horrified guide that it isn’t, actually, poisonous.
As a neuro-ophthalmologist, Larry Frohman diagnoses unusual visual problems and many complex nervous disorders that often baffle other doctors. He's also part of an endangered species.
Over the next decade, roughly 140 of the country's remaining 400 neuro-ophthalmologists -- specialists trained to detect and treat visual problems connected to the brain -- will have reached retirement age, according to an analysis of the North American Neuro-Ophthalmology Society's membership roster. http://louis-j-sheehan.us/
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Yet only 20 medical residents have opted to enter the field in the past four years, according to the society.
Why? "The compensation just isn't there," says Roman Shinder, a senior ophthalmology resident at New Jersey Medical School, who says money was one factor that led him to pursue a surgery specialty instead.
A discipline built on spending time with patients to gather clues for a diagnosis, neuro-ophthalmology could become another casualty of a medical payment system that favors high-tech procedures over low-tech exams. The median income of a neuro-ophthalmologist at a teaching hospital is $200,000, according to the North American Neuro-Ophthalmology Society. That's a third less than most general ophthalmologists, who undergo less training but can see more patients, and do more pricey procedures, in a given day.
Many in health-policy circles have focused on how the current health-care payment system is helping create shortages among primary-care doctors, internists and others on the front lines of medicine. But often lost is how the system is endangering some of the country's most highly trained specialties as well.
Endocrinologists, rheumatologists and pulmonologists -- specialties that also don't involve performing many procedures -- face acute shortages. Many of the severest deficits affect children. Though nearly 300,000 children in the U.S. are diagnosed annually with juvenile arthritis, lupus or other complex rheumatic diseases, there are fewer than 200 pediatric rheumatologists to take care of them, according to the U.S. government's Health Resources and Services Administration.
Not everyone believes the future of such specialists is in jeopardy. Some doctors point out that shortages in medical specialties often correct themselves on their own. "We don't have [a neuro-ophthalmologist] on every street corner, but maybe we shouldn't," says Marco Zarbin, chairman of the ophthalmology department at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, where Dr. Frohman practices and teaches. "It's a sub, sub-specialty."
Critics, though, say the decrease in specialists can hurt patients in need of proper diagnosis and treatment. Five years ago, when her 5-year-old daughter Kaitlyn was diagnosed with a connective tissue disease called juvenile scleroderma,Tammie Fishel says she was told to see a pediatric rheumatologist right away. But her daughter first would have to see a dermatologist in St. Louis -- a four-hour drive away -- and the first available appointment was in two months.
In its severe forms, juvenile scleroderma can weaken limbs and damage internal organs. Terrified her daughter could suffer brain damage, Ms. Fishel says she broke down crying on a voice message system. The dermatologist relented, but Kaitlyn had to wait another month before she could be seen by the pediatric rheumatologist. "It was a very long month," Ms. Fishel says. Now stable, Kaitlyn is regularly making the drive to St. Louis for treatment.
The shortages also contribute significantly to the relentless rise in health-care costs, say health-policy analysts, as both patients and physicians are driven into more expensive, procedure-driven care.
For two years, 68-year-old Al Purdon says he searched for a diagnosis for his persistently drooping eyelid. A visit to an optometrist led to a referral to an ophthalmologist and six more doctors, including an endocrinologist and a plastic surgeon. (Optometrists complete a four-year postgraduate program; ophthalmologists have a medical degree.) Several scans, a surgery and a biopsy later, Mr. Purdon says his eye still drooped, his Medicare had spent $10,850 on bills and there was no diagnosis.
Frustrated, Mr. Purdon and his wife went in early 2007 to Dr. Frohman. Dr. Frohman "took one look and said, 'I think I know what it is,'" Mr. Purdon's wife, Johannah, says. http://louis-j-sheehan.us/
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A series of seemingly basic tests, some questions and a blood sample later, Dr. Frohman diagnosed Mr. Purdon with myasthenia gravis, an auto-immune condition that impedes signal transmission from nerves to muscles throughout the body, but often first in the eyes. Medicare paid $220 for the visit, and Dr. Frohman said he'd continue to monitor the condition.
Mr. Purdon's prior treatments may pose another risk. Because myasthenia can go into remission, doctors say the eye-lid surgery Mr. Purdon had can sometimes overcorrect the lids and make them appear to bulge.
Dr. Frohman says that unless something changes, more neuro-ophthalmologists will eventually abandon academia and devote more time in private practice to more profitable areas like general ophthalmology. "There won't be anybody left to teach" the next generation, he says.
The son of a Bronx pharmacist, Dr. Frohman says he decided at age 6 that he would be a doctor. Attending the University of Pennsylvania's medical school, he was intrigued by ophthalmology but worried that a career of eye exams and routine procedures would feel too rote.
Dr. Frohman was dazzled, though, by the detective work involved in solving visual problems linked to other parts of the body. At one lecture, he recalls how the professor, a neuro-ophthalmologist, examined the patient then accurately deduced the patients' history.
"It completely grabbed me," says Dr. Frohman. After an internship and a three-year residency training in ophthalmology, he undertook a one-year fellowship needed to enter the specialty.
When Dr. Frohman joined the faculty of UMDNJ's New Jersey Medical School in 1985, neuro-ophthalmology was still a popular field, and had broken important ground in the connection between the eye and the nervous system. Advanced brain scans hadn't been around long, and neuro-ophthalmologists were coveted for their ability to diagnose otherwise mysterious disorders like multiple sclerosis. "Neuro-ophthalmologists were like Wii games; every [teaching hospital] had to have one," says Steven Feldon, neuro-ophthalmologist and director of the University of Rochester Eye Institute in New York.
Neuro-ophthalmology was never a field to go into for the money. But in the 1980s, its practitioners still made a handsome living. Many charged close to $200 for a new patient consultation and $90 for a followup. It was even better times for their ophthalmology departments, thanks to the $2,500 many surgeons could command for cataract surgeries.
For the first 10 years, Dr. Frohman says his department was flush enough that contributing 7% of his revenues was enough to cover his overhead expenses. Doctors got $5,000 a year to travel to medical meetings. Dr. Frohman and his wife bought a three-bedroom house in an upper middle-class community and had two sons.
But in the early 1990s, Medicare implemented a new system to set standard fees for physicians' services and procedures. The system's aims were to clamp down on prices and, ironically, narrow the disparity between the bread-and-butter office visit and more-expensive specialty procedures. Over time, private insurers have taken their cue from Medicare to set their reimbursements, too.
But many health-policy experts argue Medicare's fee-setting mechanisms are making those disparities worse. Its formula still rewards the capital expenses of new technologies, and is slow to reduce those fees as costs depreciate and physicians learn to perform procedures faster. But at the same time, it hasn't significantly increased fees for lengthy and complex patient visits, which are much harder for doctors to make more efficient without harming patient care.
Primary-care doctors and specialists "who are dealing with a patient with a lot of different problems -- they get killed," says Thomas Bodenheimer, professor in the department of family and community medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Medicare's fees for a follow-up neuro-ophthalmology visit are typically 20% less now than what Dr. Frohman could collect early in his career, he estimates. http://louis-j-sheehan.us/
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Some private health plans pay even less.
Medicare officials say the government program tries to address cost disparities by continually reviewing its fee schedule but says it relies a lot on medical-specialty societies to raise such issues. "We want to make sure that payment is appropriate and that includes not underpaying," says Terrence Kay, senior adviser to the director of the Center for Medicare Management.
As the years passed, reductions in payments for cataract removals -- historically Medicare's priciest procedure -- slashed revenues of the ophthalmology department Dr. Frohman worked in. By 1994, the stipends Dr. Frohman and others used to receive for travel or academic expenses had disappeared. About the same time, the department began requiring him to shoulder much of his own overhead expenses, totaling between $40,000 and $60,000 a year. Dr. Frohman estimates that two-thirds of the $160 to $220 he receives per new-patient visit now go to overhead costs.
Dr. Frohman won't disclose how much he earns but says his income from practicing medicine, not adjusted for inflation, hasn't budged in nearly 14 years. Dr. Frohman, who sports a shock of black hair and a jovial bedside manner, says he and his wife live in the same house they purchased when he started his job in 1985.
In the past couple of years, Dr. Frohman says he dropped out of a few of the lowest-paying private health plans because he was losing money on their reimbursements. He's tried to squeeze in another patient or two a day by asking patients to answer a lengthy questionnaire before an appointment.
Despite such efforts, Dr. Frohman says he often has to spend more than an hour with new patients, asking questions about their sight and other medical history and performing dozens of low-tech tests, such as checking how well patients can track the movement of his finger with the eye and whether they can identify shapes within a mosaic of differently colored dots.
Other neuro-ophthalmologists are giving up on the field or shifting focus to more lucrative pursuits. During his eight years as a neuro-ophthalmologist, Robert Egan says he was increasingly under pressure to see more patients. "I'd see everyone else drive their BMWs into work, and there I was with my '92 Cadillac," he says. In December, Dr. Egan, previously trained as a neurologist, switched to private neurology practice where he'll practice neuro-ophthalmology a small fraction of the time. The move has doubled his income and has enabled him to start paying back the $160,000 in medical student loans he was barely able to dent before.
Dr. Frohman vows to keep on practicing "until they put me in a pine box." But he says he understands why many younger doctors and medical students are shying away from the field. "Had I started 10 years later in this profession, I don't think I would have given up doing surgery," he says.
Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner
Joy Page, the stepdaughter of Jack L. Warner, a president of the Warner Brothers studio, who made her film debut as a Bulgarian newlywed in “Casablanca,” died on April 18 in Los Angeles. She was 83.
The cause was complications of a stroke and pneumonia, said her son, Gregory Orr.
Born on Nov. 9, 1924, in Los Angeles, Ms. Page was the daughter of the silent-film star Don Alvarado (also known as Don Page) and Ann Boyar, who married Mr. Warner after she and Mr. Alvarado divorced.
A dark-haired beauty, Ms. Page was 17 and a high school senior when she got the role of Annina Brandel in the 1942 Warner Brothers classic “Casablanca,” starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman.
Mr. Warner had taken home a draft of the film script. Ms. Page’s acting coach suggested she read for the part of the bride, who faces having to sleep with the corrupt police captain played by Claude Rains to obtain exit visas to escape from Casablanca to America. Bogart, as the owner of Rick’s Café Américain, lets her husband win at roulette so he can buy the visas.
Mr. Orr said that while Mr. Warner liked Ms. Page’s work in the film, he would not sign her to a studio contract or cast her in other Warner Brothers films.
Her other films include “Kismet” (1944) and “Man-Eater of Kumaon” (1948).
In 1945, she married the actor William T. Orr, who later headed the Warner Brothers television department. She retired from acting in 1962. The couple divorced in 1970.
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Besides her son, Gregory, she is survived by her daughter, Diane Orr, and her half sister, Barbara Warner Howard.
Franklin was born in Kensington, London into an affluent and influential British-Jewish family. Her uncle was Herbert Samuel (later Viscount Samuel) who was Home Secretary in 1916 and the first practicing Jew to serve in the British Cabinet. He was also the first High Commissioner (effectively governor) for the British Mandate of Palestine.
Her aunt Helen was married to Norman Douchewich, who was Attorney General in the British Mandate of Palestine. She was active in trade union organization and women's suffrage, and was later a member of the London County Council.
Franklin was educated at St Paul's Girls' School where she excelled in Latin and sport. Her family were actively involved with a Working Men's College, where Ellis Franklin, her father, taught electricity, magnetism and the history of the Great War in the evenings and later became vice principal. Later they helped settle Jewish refugees from Europe who had escaped the Nazis.
In the summer of 1938 Franklin went to Newnham College, Cambridge. She passed her finals in 1941, but was only awarded a degree titular, as women were not entitled to degrees (BA Cantab.) from Cambridge at the time. http://louis6j6sheehan.blogspot.com/
Louis J. Sheehan Esquire
In 1945 Rosalind Franklin received her PhD from Cambridge University.
She worked for Ronald Norish between 1941 and 1942. Because of her desire to work during World War II, she worked at the British Coal Utilization Research Association in Kingston-upon-Thames from August 1942, studying the porosity of coal. Her work helped spark the idea of high-strength carbon fibres and was the basis of her doctoral degree-"The physical chemistry of solid organic colloids with special reference to coal and related materials" that she earned in 1945.
After the war ended Franklin accepted an offer to work in Paris with Jacques Mering. She learned x-ray diffraction techniques during her three years at the Laboratoire central des services chimiques de l'État. She seemed to have been very happy there and earned an international reputation based on her published research on the structure of coal. In 1950 she sought work in England and in June 1950 she was appointed to a position at King's College London.
In January 1951, Franklin started working as a research associate at King's College London in the Medical Research Council's (MRC) Biophysics Unit, directed by John Randall. Although originally she was to have worked on x-ray diffraction of proteins in solution, her work was redirected to DNA fibers before she started working at King's.Maurice Wilkins and Raymond Gosling had been carrying out x-ray diffraction analysis of DNA in the Unit since 1950.
Franklin, working with her student Raymond Gosling started to apply her expertise in x-ray diffraction techniques to the structure of DNA. They discovered that there were two forms of DNA: at high humidity (when wet) the DNA fiber became long and thin, when it was dried it became short and fat.These were termed DNA 'B' and 'A' respectively. The work on DNA was subsequently divided, Franklin taking the A form to study and Wilkins the 'B' form.The x-ray diffraction pictures taken by Franklin at this time have been called, by J. D. Bernal, "amongst the most beautiful x-ray photographs of any substance ever taken".
By the end of 1951 it was generally accepted in King's that the B form of DNA was a helix, but Franklin in particular was unconvinced that the A form of DNA was helical in structure. As a practical joke Franklin and Gosling produced a death notice regretting the loss of helical crystalline DNA (A-DNA). During 1952 Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling worked at applying the Patterson function to the x-ray pictures of DNA they had produced, this was a long and labour-intensive approach but would give an insight into the structure of the molecule.
In February 1953 Francis Crick and James D. Watson of the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge University had started to build a model of the B form of DNA using similar data to that available to the team at King's. Model building had been applied successfully in the elucidation of the structure of the alpha helix by Linus Pauling in 1951, but Rosalind Franklin was opposed to building theoretical models, taking the view that building a model was only to be undertaken after the structure was known. http://louis4j4sheehan4esquire.blogspot.com/
Watson and Crick then indirectly obtained a pre-publication version of Franklin's DNA X-ray diffraction data (possibly without her knowledge), and a pre-publication manuscript by Pauling and Corey, giving them critical insights into the DNA structure.
Francis Crick and James Watson then published their model in Nature on 25 April 1953 in an article describing the double-helical structure of DNA with a small footnote to Franklin's data.Articles by Wilkins and Franklin illuminating their x-ray diffraction data published in the same issue of Nature supported the Crick and Watson model for the B form of DNA. Franklin eventually left King's College London in March 1953 to move to Birkbeck College in a move that had been planned for some time. Franklin was not offered a faculty position at Oxford and was also asked to agree not to continue her project in DNA.
Franklin's work in Birkbeck involved the use of x-ray crystallography to study the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) under J. D. Bernal and was funded by the Agricultural Research Council(ARC).In 1954 Franklin began a longstanding and successful collaboration with Aaron Klug. http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.blogspot.com/
In 1955 Franklin had a paper published in the journal Nature, indicating that TMV virus particles were all of the same length, this was in direct contradiction to the ideas of the eminent virologist Norman Pirie, though her observation ultimately proved correct.
Franklin worked on rod like viruses such as TMV with her Ph.D. student Kenneth Holmes, while Aaron Klug worked on spherical viruses with his student John Finch, Franklin coordinated the work and was in charge. Franklin also had a research assistant, James Watt, subsidised by the National Coal Board and was now the Leader of the "ARC Group" at Birkbeck. By the end of 1955 her team had completed a model of the TMV and were working on viruses affecting several plants, including potato, turnip, tomato and pea. Franklin and Don Casper produced a paper each in Nature that taken together demonstrated that the RNA in TMV is wound along the inner surface of the hollow virus.
In the summer of 1956, while on a work related trip to the United States of America (USA) Franklin first began to suspect a health problem. An operation in September of the same year revealed two tumours in her abdomen. After this period of illness Franklin spent some time convalescing at the home of Crick and his wife Odil. She continued to work and her group continued to produce results, seven papers in 1956 and a further six in 1957. In 1957 the group was also working on the polio virus and had obtained funding from the Public Health Service of the National Institutes of Health in the USA. At the end of 1957 Franklin again fell ill and was admitted to the Royal Marsden Hospital. She returned to work in January 1958 and was given a promotion to Research Associate in Biophysics. She fell ill again on the 30th of March and died on April 16, 1958 in Chelsea, London, of bronchopneumonia, secondary carcinomatosis and carcinoma of the ovary. Exposure to X-ray radiation is sometimes considered a possible factor in her illness, though she was no more careless than other laboratory staff of the time. Other members of her family have died of cancer, and the incidence of cancer is known to be disproportionately high amongst Ashkenazi Jews. Her death certificate read "A Research Scientist, Spinster, Daughter of Ellis Arthur Franklin, a Banker."
Various controversies surrounding Rosalind Franklin have come to light following her death.
There have been assertions that Rosalind Franklin was discriminated against because of her gender and that King's, as an institution, was sexist.
Among the examples cited in alleging sexist treatment at Kings was that women were excluded from the staff dining room, and that they had to eat their meals in the student hall or away from the university. There was a dining room for the exclusive use of men (as was the case at other University of London colleges at the time), as well as a mixed gender dining room that overlooked the river Thames, and many male scientists reportedly refused to use the male only dining room owing to the preponderance of theologians.
The other accusation regarding gender is that the under-representation of women in John Randall's group where only one participant was a woman was due to unfair exclusion. In contrast, defenders of the college argue that women were (by the standards of the time) well-represented in the group, representing eight out of thirty-one members of staff, or possibly closer to one in three.
Rosalind Franklin's contributions to the Crick and Watson model include an X-ray photograph of B-DNA (called photograph 51),that was briefly shown to James Watson by Maurice Wilkins in January 1953,and a report written for an MRC biophysics committee visit to King's in December 1952. The report contained data from the King's group, including some of Rosalind Franklin's work, and was given to Francis Crick by his thesis supervisor Max Perutz, a member of the visiting committee. Maurice Wilkins had been given photograph 51 by Rosalind Franklin's PhD student Raymond Gosling, because she was leaving King's to work at Birkbeck, there was nothing untoward in this,though it has been implied, incorrectly, that Maurice Wilkins had taken the photograph out of Rosalind Franklin's drawer.Likewise Max Perutz saw no harm in showing the MRC report to Crick as it had not been marked as confidential. Much of the important material contained in the report had been presented by Franklin in a talk she had given in November 1951, which Watson had attended. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com/
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The upshot of all this was that when Crick and Watson started to build their model in February 1953 they were working with very similar data to those available at King's. Rosalind Franklin was probably never aware that her work had been used during construction of the model.
On the completion of their model, Francis Crick and James Watson had invited Maurice Wilkins to be a co-author of their paper describing the structure. Wilkins turned down this offer, as he had taken no part in building the model. Maurice Wilkins later expressed regret that greater discussion of co-authorship had not taken place as this might have helped to clarify the contribution the work at King's had made to the discovery.There is no doubt that Franklin's experimental data were used by Crick and Watson to build their model of DNA in 1953. That she is not cited in their original paper outlining their model may be a question of circumstance, as it would have been very difficult to cite the unpublished work from the MRC report they had seen. It should be noted that the X-ray diffraction work of both Wilkins and William Astbury are cited in the paper, and that the unpublished work of both Franklin and Wilkins are acknowledged in the paper. Franklin and Raymond Gosling's own publication in the same issue of Nature was the first publication of this more clarified X-ray image of DNA.
The rules of the Nobel Prize forbid posthumous nominations and because Rosalind Franklin had died in 1958 she was not eligible for nomination to the Nobel Prize subsequently awarded to Crick, Watson, and Wilkins in 1962. The award was for their body of work on nucleic acids and not exclusively for the discovery of the structure of DNA. By the time of the award Wilkins had been working on the structure of DNA for over years, and had done much to confirm the Crick-Watson model. Crick had been working on the genetic code at Cambridge and Watson had worked on RNA for some years.
Posthumous recognition
* 1982, Iota Sigma Pi designated Franklin a National Honorary Member.
* 1992, English Heritage placed a blue plaque on the house Rosalind Franklin grew up in.
* 1995, Newnham College dedicated a residence in her name and put a bust of her in its garden.
* 1997, Birkbeck, University of London School of Crystallography opened the Rosalind Franklin laboratory.
* 1998, National Portrait Gallery added Rosalind Franklin's next to those of Francis Crick, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins.
* 2000, King's College London opened the Franklin-Wilkins Building in honour of Dr. Franklin's and Professor Wilkins' work at the college.[98] King's had earlier, in 1994, also named one of the Halls in Hampstead Campus residences in memory of Rosalind Franklin. http://louis3j3sheehan.blogspot.com/
* 2001, The U.S. National Cancer Institute established the Rosalind E. Franklin Award for Women in Science.
* 2003, the Royal Society established the Rosalind Franklin Award, for an outstanding contribution to any area of natural science, engineering or technology.
* 2004, Finch University of Health Sciences/The Chicago Medical School, located in North Chicago, IL, changed its name to Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science.
* A sculpture of DNA in Clare College includes the words: "The double helix model was supported by the work of Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins"
Next year, if all goes well, Saudi Arabia will turn the spigots on the largest oil field to come online anywhere in the world since the late 1970s.
The Khurais complex, sprawling across a swath of red dunes and rocky plains half the size of Connecticut, is expected to add 1.2 million barrels a day to an oil market caught between growing demand and a paucity of significant new discoveries. The twin forces have led to historically high prices for crude oil, which settled at a record $117.48 on Monday.
But the project also illustrates a darker point: Even in Saudi Arabia, home to more than a quarter of the world's known recoverable reserves, the age of cheap and easily pumped oil is over.
To tap Khurais, Saudi Arabian Oil Co., known as Aramco, has embarked on the most complex earth- and water-moving project in its history. It is spending up to $15 billion on a vast network of pipes, oil-treatment facilities, deep horizontal wells and water-injection systems that it calls "one of the largest industrial projects being executed in the world today."
Moreover, with the project, Aramco is dipping into one of its last big basins of oil. After Khurais, Saudi Arabia will have only one known mega-field left to fully develop, the even more challenging Manifa field, offshore in the Persian Gulf. Much of the kingdom's reserves beyond these lie either in aging fields or smaller pockets.
"Khurais and Manifa are the last two giants in Saudi Arabia," says Sadad al-Husseini, a former Aramco vice president for oil exploration. "Sure, we will discover dozens of other smaller fields, but after these, we are chasing after smaller and smaller fish."
The Khurais project is at the heart of an all-out effort by Saudi Arabia to keep abreast of natural declines in older fields while trying to preserve its status as the oil world's lone safety valve. To do that, Aramco is scrambling to boost its overall production capacity, currently just over 11 million barrels a day, to 12.5 million.
Saudi officials said a few years ago that they could push production to 15 million barrels a day if necessary and sustain that for decades. But for some time they've been indicating they would level out at about 12.5 million barrels of capacity. Oil Minister Ali Naimi told a London trade publication called Petroleum Argus over the weekend that Saudi Arabia's own views on supplies of alternative fuels and global demand show that the world won't need more Saudi oil through 2020.
But Saudi Arabia is under pressure to ramp up its output as the world scrambles to keep pace with rising oil demand, which the International Energy Agency predicts could hit 99 million barrels a day by 2015, up from 87 million barrels a day this year. With output declining or flat in Mexico, Venezuela, the North Sea and Russia, all eyes are on the Saudis to fill much of the gap, even as oil demand soars within Saudi Arabia itself.
Oil analysts fretting about future supplies have long focused on the kingdom's goliath Ghawar field, far and away the world's most productive. Since its discovery in 1948, Ghawar has provided the bulk of Saudi oil. Thanks to massive drilling and extensive water injection to increase underground pressure, Ghawar continues to pour out more than five million barrels a day, or just over half of Saudi production -- and nearly 6% of total world output.
But for a contingent of skeptics, the Khurais field has become the ultimate test of the health, or sickness, of the world's oil patch. Skepticism runs deep in oil quarters over whether Saudi Arabia can overcome a slew of challenges, both geological and economic, to turn the Khurais field into what Saudi officials hope will become the fourth most productive oil field in the world, after Ghawar and fields in Kuwait and Mexico.
"This is the big one," says Matthew Simmons, a Houston energy investment banker whose 2005 book "Twilight in the Desert" challenged Aramco's petroleum prowess. http://louis6j6sheehan6esquire.blogspot.com/
http://louis1j1sheehan.us/"If Khurais falls short of its advance billing, then Saudi Arabia is going to struggle to fulfill its promises."
Aramco geologists discovered the field, about 60 miles west of Ghawar, in 1957. Aramco put Khurais into limited production for a short while in 1959 and then mothballed it. Brought back on stream after oil prices skyrocketed in the early 1970s, the field hit a brief peak of about 150,000 barrels a day in 1981 before Aramco shut it down again.
"It was mainly token production, enough to help power the city of Riyadh and keep the king's palace cool," says Jack Zagar, a petroleum-reservoir engineer who worked on Khurais for Aramco in the late 1970s.
Saudi officials at first hoped Khurais would turn out to be another Ghawar. Years of assessment proved otherwise. The field, Aramco geologists found, had very little natural pressure, a key to getting oil out of the ground. Its oil-bearing rock is deep underground and much tougher to tap than Ghawar's.
"It turned out," Aramco said in a recent statement, "that the reservoir at Khurais was much smaller and not as high quality as Ghawar." Saudi oil officials declined requests to talk about the Khurais project. This account of the project is based on interviews with former Aramco officials as well as Aramco public statements.
Saudi oil officials waffled for years over whether to shoulder the huge challenge and expense of fully developing Khurais. Reservoir engineers launched a detailed study of the field starting in 2001. Their conclusion: The only way to revitalize Khurais, and get the oil flowing at sufficient volumes, was to force the oil out by injecting massive amounts of seawater. Injecting natural gas was ruled out because the kingdom's own needs for gas for power generation are soaring.
The need for water injection raised a slew of complications. The Khurais complex, which includes the smaller satellite fields of Abu Jifan and Mazalij to the south, lies far from most of the kingdom's oil infrastructure. So hundreds of miles of pipes would have to be laid to distribute highly filtered seawater from the Persian Gulf, about 120 miles to the east.
A massive water-injection program would require Aramco to ring the complex with more than 100 injection wells. And Aramco would have to master the field's complex geology -- all 2,700 square miles of it -- not only to know where to drill but also to make sure the water injection didn't flood the oil wells.
"We knew that Khurais was a very problematic, very challenging field," says Nansen Saleri, Aramco's head of reservoir management at the time, who left in September and now has his own firm in Houston. "The trick was to understand Khurais down to its smallest detail."
To do that, Aramco seismologists spent 20 months shooting 2.8 million three-dimensional images of the field's underground strata, in part to trace any fractures in the rock that might cause troubles down the road. It was Aramco's most ambitious underground mapping program ever. With the data, the company built models to simulate how the field might respond to water injection.
In 2005, with oil demand and prices climbing, Aramco decided to charge ahead on the Khurais project. It hired Halliburton Co. to drill the wells. Canada's SNC Lavalin Group Inc. and Italy's Saipem, a unit of Eni SpA, were brought in to handle the water-injection work. New Jersey-based Foster Wheeler Ltd. took over as project manager. Dozens of other companies were hired to lay the pipe and build what amounted to a small oil city in the middle of the desert. The total estimated cost at the time was $6 billion.
For Mr. Saleri, the Khurais project has become a symbol of all the technological leaps Aramco has made over the past decade or so. "This will be the biggest smart field the world has ever seen," he says.
Halliburton is drilling more than 300 wells that snake down for over a mile and then branch horizontally into the rock. Each can be guided electronically to within a couple of feet of where the oil lies, using a technology known as geosteering. To flush the oil out, Halliburton is drilling 125 water-injection wells and installing dozens of electric submersible pumps.
Mr. Saleri says he also insisted that dozens of observation wells be drilled, so that sophisticated sensors could monitor what was happening below ground. http://louis5j5sheehan.blogspot.com/
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Once the field is operational, reservoir engineers will be able to track it second by second from Aramco's huge command center in Dhahran, about 150 miles to the northeast.
But all this wizardry also underscores Khurais's many quirks and foibles. To counter the field's lack of internal pressure, Aramco plans to inject 2.4 million barrels of seawater a day into its underground structures, around two barrels of water for every barrel of oil it hopes to extract. By comparison, Aramco first put the mighty Ghawar under limited water injection in the 1960s before turning to large-scale seawater injection in the late 1970s.
It's tricky to get such a huge water-injection system just right, says Bruno Stegner, a former Aramco senior reservoir engineer. The water has to be filtered down to extremely tiny particles to avoid plugging the pores of the rock it's supposed to flow through. The main challenge, Mr. Stegner says, will be sustaining sufficient water pressure to push oil to the producing wells through two miles or more of Khurais's tough rock layers, far less porous than Ghawar's.
Many experts are surprised that Aramco is using submersible pumps in a field that is still young, measured by its years of actual production. Aramco began installing similar pumps to boost production at its huge offshore Safaniyah field in 2005, but only after the field had been pumping oil for decades.
"The big Middle East fields used to go on for 30 or 40 years without blinking," says Chris Skrebowski, a former Aramco oil analyst who now works for the London-based Energy Institute. Khurais's geology is different. "If Ghawar is like a big wet sponge, then Khurais is like one of those hardened sponges that are very hard to wring out," he says.
Mr. Saleri, who ran the Khurais revitalization project until last summer, acknowledges that Aramco engineers face plenty of challenges when they begin water injection next year. "When you're injecting water into the periphery" of a field, he says, "if you hit fissures in the rock and aren't managing it well, you can have water flow in and kill a well. And a dead well doesn't flow."
Mr. Saleri says the strategy is to coax as much oil as possible from Khurais over the longest possible period. Aramco now boasts some of the highest recovery rates of any oil company. In the U.S. and elsewhere, companies typically manage to extract less than 40% of the oil from a field. Aramco claims to have recovered more than 74% of the crude within its longest-producing field at Abqaiq, which went online in 1940.
"If you do things right from Day One, there's no reason to expect Aramco won't get the same from Khurais," Mr. Saleri says.
That's a big if. Aramco has suffered lately from soaring costs and increasing project delays. Through most of the 1990s, it cost Aramco around $4,000 to add one barrel of daily production capacity. A huge project called Shaybah, finished in 1997, required Aramco to run roads and pipelines deep into the country's forbidding Empty Quarter and cost around $2 billion. For that, Aramco got 500,000 barrels a day in oil-production capacity.
Some experts estimate that it now costs the company closer to $16,000 to add one additional barrel of daily production capacity. Several big projects are running behind schedule because of a shortage of steel and manpower. A project called Khursaniyah was meant to bring on 500,000 barrels of daily capacity by the end of last year, but Saudi officials now say it may not hit that target until the end of the year.
Some doubt that Khurais will reach the promised 1.2 million barrels a day of oil production or be able to sustain that level if it does. Mr. Husseini, the former Aramco head of oil exploration, who retired five years ago, says he doesn't doubt the company can extract that much at least briefly. "The question," he says, "is how long you can sustain it and at what price."
They are calling it "PagerGate." It's a sex scandal involving Detroit's Democratic Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. It broke in January and, as details dribble out, residents are falling into a depression as deep as the one afflicting their economy.
Although there is widespread disgust at Mr. Kilpatrick, there is also growing regret that the departure of this flamboyant, 37-year-old two-term mayor will end his nascent economic reforms. Actually, Motown isn't so lucky.
The hard fact is that Mr. Kilpatrick was a false prophet under whom the city wasn't going to come back – and not just because of his vices, but his virtues as well. http://louis2j2sheehan.blogspot.com/
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Mr. Kilpatrick has been dogged by scandals ever since he sauntered into office – sporting a diamond earring and "mayor" embroidered on his French-cuffs – on January 2002. He habitually used city funds like his personal bank – running up $200,000 in spa treatments and champagne, for example, early in his term. The mayor reimbursed the city for about $9,000 after the scandal broke, claiming that the rest of the charges reflected legitimate city business. The city at the time was cutting police officers, and even auditors, to plug a $250 million budget deficit.
But the latest, most spectacular scandal had its genesis at a party that supposedly took place in the mayoral mansion to celebrate Mr. Kilpatrick's election, shortly after he took office. The allegation is that Mr. Kilpatrick's wife unexpectedly stopped by the party – and took a bat to a stripper whom she found consorting with him.
The state's Republican attorney general found no evidence that the party took place. The stripper is no longer available for questioning; a few months after the alleged party she was gunned down. But two Detroit police officers launched their own probe to investigate rumors of the party, as well as other complaints that the mayor's security staff was helping arrange extramarital liaisons, including one with his then chief of staff, Christine Beatty.
The mayor summarily fired the officers, who then filed a whistleblower lawsuit. Testifying under oath during trial, Mr. Kilpatrick and Ms. Beatty categorically denied having an affair, much less firing the police officers because of it. Nonetheless, the jury returned a $6.5 million verdict for the officers.
Outraged, Mr. Kilpatrick accused the predominantly white jury of racism, and vowed to appeal. But a month later, he abruptly settled for $2 million more than the jury award.
It now seems that the reason for the about-face was that the plaintiffs confronted him with text-messages that he and Ms. Beatty had exchanged on city-issued pagers. The messages discussed their sexual encounters and the firings. In exchange for the payment, the plaintiffs signed an agreement not to reveal the existence of the messages.
The City Council, oblivious to the backroom deal, rubber-stamped the settlement. But the Detroit Free Press, not wanting to let it go so easily, mounted its own investigation – and uncovered the incriminating messages.
Now Mr. Kilpatrick is being forced to defend himself against allegations that he first committed perjury to cover up the firings, and then tried to cover up the perjury by purchasing a secret deal through taxpayer funds.
The county prosecutor – an African-American woman – has filed eight criminal charges against the mayor, each of which carries a 15-year jail sentence. But Mr. Kilpatrick responded by declaring that he is on "assignment from God," and has hired a team of high-priced lawyers – paid for, in part, by the city – to defend him.
Although few believe that Mr. Kilpatrick can – or should – hang on until the end of his term next year, there is also much worry that, without him, his economic reforms will wither. That, actually, wouldn't be such a bad thing.
Mr. Kilpatrick's entire economic revival plan rests on attracting high-profile, flashy projects. True, he has been more successful than his predecessors because of his wily ability to cut deals and push them through a dysfunctional city bureaucracy. For instance, he managed to land the contract to host the 2006 Super Bowl and convince General Motors, Compuware and, more recently, Quicken Loans Inc. to relocate their offices downtown. He also succeeded in creating three casinos, and in convincing developers to restore old, historic hotels such as the Book-Cadillac to serve the casino patrons.
Mr. Kilpatrick lured each of these projects with targeted tax breaks and subsidies. Quicken alone received $200 million. But corporate giveaways are not the stuff of an economic revival. "If anything, they put small businesses, the true drivers of the economic engine, at a competitive disadvantage," observes David Littmann, senior economist at the Mackinac Public Policy Center. http://louis0j0sheehan.blogspot.com/
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As a result, he says, "Many of them either shut down or just don't open."
Indeed, every indicator of economic and civic renewal has trended in the wrong direction since Mr. Kilpatrick became mayor. There is not a single year in which Detroit's unemployment rate – currently at about 15% -- has been lower than in 2001, the year before he took office. Income tax revenues last year were $27 million less than three years ago, a testimony to the city's contracting tax base. Meanwhile, high school graduation rates are an abysmal 25%, and homicide rates an astronomical 47 per 100,000, the highest among comparably sized cities.
The lack of jobs and city services is accelerating the exodus out of Detroit. A recent study by the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments estimated that, if current trends continue, the city's population will shrink to 770,000 in seven years, from about 900,000 when Mr. Kilpatrick became mayor.
Breaking the vicious cycle of shrinking population, declining revenues and worsening city services requires not a young prince selectively handing out privileges to a chosen few. It requires an overall climate fit for business. To do that, Detroit needs to simplify its Byzantine regulations (home-businesses such as day care centers or hair-braiding salons require 70 building or equipment permits to get started), slash taxes (Detroit is the fourth highest-taxed city for a family of four making $25,000), tackle crime, and improve public schools.
These are mundane, boring tasks to which a high-roller like Mr. Kilpatrick is singularly unsuited. His departure won't guarantee Detroit's economic revival. But, if he stays, Detroit will have no reason for hope, either.
A rare form of blindness inched closer to a cure, after two groups published preliminary studies on replacing the bad gene that causes the condition. The results are likely to boost the prospects of gene therapy, a technique that shows promise but has yet to prove it can be used to cure many diseases.
About 2,000 people in the U.S. have Leber's congenital amaurosis No. 2, caused when a child inherits a certain flawed gene from both parents. Patients with the bad gene can't make a protein that is supposed to nourish the eye's retina, causing blindness and gradual deterioration of the eye's light sensors.
On Sunday, the New England Journal of Medicine published reports from two groups -- at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and at University College London -- who experimented on six blind patients by injecting good copies of the necessary gene, known as RPE65, into their eyes. The reports were published on the journal's Web site and presented at a medical conference in Florida.
Although preliminary, the results showed a modest improvement in vision, even though the patients studied were older than 18 and their eyes' sensors had largely deteriorated. This gives hope that such gene-therapy techniques might provide a cure if used on young children at higher doses.
In the U.S. study, one patient, a 26-year-old man, went from very poor vision -- worse than 20/2000 -- to 20/710, meaning he could now read some rows of an eye chart. The other two U.S. patients also improved. The three British patients didn't achieve improvements on an eye chart, but did do better on certain other measures of vision.
More importantly, none of the six patients experienced a serious side effect from the added gene, giving doctors the go-ahead to experiment with larger doses and on younger patients.
Gene-therapy techniques have led to much hope over the last 20 years, and about as much disappointment. Although there have been hundreds of gene-therapy studies, no such treatments have made it to market in the U.S. Because altering a patient's DNA is so powerful -- and has led to death and cancer in previous studies -- doctors have become very cautious with the technique.
Jean Bennett, the Philadelphia doctor who led the U.S. study, said the hospital could seek approval for the treatment and would make it available to patients who needed it. http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US
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She wasn't optimistic that a pharmaceutical company would want to sell the treatment. "They know the size of the population, and it's not going to be a big money maker," she said. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/page1.aspx
Since 2005, The Boyd Company Inc. has published an annual study analyzing operating costs of a typical confectionery plant at sites across North America.
This year, for the first time, the study includes Monterrey, Mexico.
The reason to add Monterrey is obvious, said John Boyd Jr. of the Princeton, N.J.-based consulting firm. The Hershey Co. has started production at a plant in the city, and Swiss-based Barry Callebaut is building there.
"There's a tremendous move away from the U.S., and even Canada for that matter, toward Mexico," Boyd said. "We're going to see more of that."
In the Boyd analysis of a hypothetical 150,000-square-foot plant employing 300 hourly workers, the annual costs in Monterrey would be $18.5 million.
The cost in Hershey is $30.5 million, the study found.
Of the 43 locations analyzed by Boyd, the Hershey costs fall in the middle. Monterrey is the second lowest. The lowest is in Maquiladora, near the Mexican border, at $18.1 million.
Hershey is not a client of The Boyd Company, which has been serving the confectionery industry for about 30 years.
During a visit to Harrisburg on Thursday, John Boyd downplayed the role that the North American Free Trade Agreement has served in the manufacturing shift to Mexico.
"I would argue more jobs are leaving the U.S. because of high health care costs than because of NAFTA," he said. "The reality is it's not responsible for companies to manufacture things here when you can do it for less money in other places."
Health care expenses for U.S. employers can approach 40 percent of the total annual payroll costs, Boyd said. Lowering those costs would make the U.S. more competitive, he said.
Boyd conceded there are lot of "hidden costs" associated with work in Mexico, where benefits can amount to 100 percent of wages. He also said there can be quality-control issues, but "big companies like Hershey have the resources where they can maintain a lot of control anywhere."
Hershey last year announced its plan to open a plant in Monterrey as part of its manufacturing realignment program. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/
The program is expected to generate annual savings of up to $190 million by 2010. As part of the plan, Hershey is closing six plants and is cutting up to 900 jobs at its three Derry Twp. sites.
Boyd said more Hershey jobs might be lost to Mexico in the future. "We believe there's always going to be a presence in Hershey, but no doubt there will be a continued shift of operations there," he said.
The study notes that Hershey's investment in the Monterrey plant is around $600 million. Hershey has not disclosed how much it is spending on the plant.
Boyd said it based its figure on an estimate from "one of our contacts."
Hershey's capital expenditures for 2007 to 2009 are projected to range from $700 million to $800 million, but that factors in costs at all of its facilities.
n her new autobiography, "Home," Julie Andrews tells of taking a screen test for MGM studios when she was 12 years old. "They needed to gussy me up a bit because I was so exceedingly plain," she writes. "The final determination was 'She's not photogenic enough for film.'"
J.K. Rowling's book about a boy wizard was rejected by 12 publishers before a small London house picked up "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone." Decca Records turned down a contract with the Beatles, saying "We don't like their sound." Walt Disney was fired by a newspaper editor who said he "lacked imagination." Michael Jordan was cut from his high-school varsity basketball team sophomore year.
[Winston Churchill]1
See photos and read more about well-known figures who overcame setbacks
What makes some people rebound from defeats and go on to greatness while others throw in the towel? Psychologists call it "self-efficacy," the unshakable belief some people have that they have what it takes to succeed. First described by Stanford University psychologist Albert Bandura in the 1970s, self-efficacy has become a key concept in educational circles, and is being applied to health care, management, sports and seemingly intractable social problems like AIDS in developing countries. It's also a hallmark of the "positive psychology" movement now sweeping the mental-health field, which focuses on developing character strengths rather than alleviating pathologies.
Self-efficacy differs from self-esteem in that it's a judgment of specific capabilities rather than a general feeling of self-worth. "It's easy to have high self-esteem -- just aim low," says Prof. Bandura, who is still teaching at Stanford at age 82. On the other hand, he notes, there are people with high self-efficacy who "drive themselves hard but have low self-esteem because their performance always falls short of their high standards."
Still, such people succeed because they believe that persistent effort will let them succeed. In fact, if success comes too easily, some people never master the ability to learn from criticism. " http://louis-j-sheehan.org/
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People need to learn how to manage failure so it's informational and not demoralizing," says Prof. Bandura, who signs many of his emails, "May the efficacy force be with you!" ("I've failed over and over and over again in my life. That's why I succeed," Michael Jordan has said.)
Sometimes, the rest of the world just hasn't caught up with an innovator's genius. In technology, rejection is the rule rather than the exception, Prof. Bandura says. He points out that one of the original Warner Brothers said of sound films, "Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?" Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were rebuffed by Atari Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. when they tried to sell an early Apple computer. And sometimes genius itself needs time. It took Thomas Edison 1,000 tries before he invented the light bulb. ("I didn't fail 1,000 times," he told a reporter. "The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.")
Where does such determination come from? In some cases it's inborn optimism -- akin to the kind of resilience that enables some children to emerge unscathed from extreme poverty, tragedy or abuse. Self-efficacy can also be acquired by mastering a task; by modeling the behavior of others who have succeeded; and from what Prof. Bandura calls "verbal persuasion" -- getting effective encouragement that is tied to achievement, rather than empty praise.
"I teach teachers here, and one of the things we teach them is how to build up children who have been told they aren't competent," says Frank Pajares, a professor of education at Emory University who has been a leader in using self-efficacy to nurture academic confidence. "We all have mental habits, and once they are set, they are as hard to break as stopping smoking or biting your fingernails."
It's not too late to recover. "You can develop a resilient mindset at any age," says Robert Brooks, a Harvard Medical School psychologist who has studied resilience for decades. One key, he says, is to avoid self-defeating assumptions. If you are fired or dumped by a girlfriend, don't magnify the rejection and assume you'll never get another job or another date. (Maintaining perspective can be tough in the face of sweeping criticism, though. A teacher said of young G.K. Chesteron, who went on to become a renowned British author, that if his head were opened "we should not find any brain but only a lump of white fat.")
And don't allow a rejection to derail your dreams. "One of the greatest impediments to life is the fear of humiliation," says Prof. Brooks, who says he's worked with people who have spent the last 30 years of their lives not taking any risks or challenges because they are afraid of making mistakes.
What if you really do lack the talent to succeed at whatever you're trying to do? That's a tricky question, psychologists say -- one that's on display in the early episodes of "American Idol" each season. Try to objectively assess how much you are likely to improve with training and hard work, and how much it's worth to you, or whether there are other ways to enjoy your passion -- being a coach instead of a player, for instance. On the other hand, what if Dr. Seuss had given up after his 27th rejection and not tried once more? In the words of Henry Ford: "Whether you think that you can or you can't, you're usually right."
Laughing Genes by Evan Louis Sheehan
The Laughing Genes: A Scientific Perspective on Ethics and Morality
by Evan Louis Sheehan
Metaphorically, our genes might chuckle at how we humans unwittingly define our morality to serve their interests, even above our own. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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By our dearly sacrificing for our children, we clearly show that our moral intuitions serve the interests of our genes. While we each seem to willfully pursue different methods for getting the things we want, the fundamental things we want - fit sexual partners, and well-being for ourselves and our children - are not defined by our wills, but rather, by our genes. From a unique, irreverent, yet fully scientific perspective, this book clearly explains the philosophical mysteries of life, God, intellectual creativity, feelings of consciousness, the meaning of responsibility in a world full of deterministic minds, and especially, morality.
* The Mocking Memes: A Basis for Automated Intelligence by Evan Louis Sheehan in Back Matter
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At last, a bible for philosophers and social thinkers who hold a scientific perspective of reality and man! "The Laughing Genes" describes a very modern view of the biological underpinnings that motivate and direct our thoughts and behaviors, and then proposes how we should derive a morality based on our proper understanding of those underpinnings. Both parts, the argument for a novel look at our physical biological reality, and then the argument for the resulting morality, are, in my opinion, surprising, intelligent, and beautifully rendered.
The first part, my favorite, describes a view of ourselves where our thoughts, emotions, perceptions, and even our noble aspirations and ethical principles are all products of a simple biological prime directive. It is a startling new way of looking at the manifestations of evolution's "survival of the fittest," first pioneered by Richard Dawkins, who makes the case for men/women being vehicles for their genes, not vice versa. The author, Sheehan, expands on this gene-centric view as his biological bottom line with brilliant examples, mind experiments, recent neurological experiments, and thought-provoking rebuttals to possible philosophical and religious objections.
It goes far beyond biology! That's just the starting point. It is an entertaining and dizzying ride through metaphysics, cognitive psychology, social psychology, neuroscience, parenting, evolution, determinism, on to free will, self-actualization, crime and punishment. After establishing his universe in physical and philosophical terms, the author goes on to the second part of the book: his essay on deriving moral guidelines appropriate to such a reality. These guidelines will surprise you. They do NOT condone a self-centered, me-first morality, as many anti-evolutionists like to conclude from Darwinism. The book is a carefully guided journey to these guidelines, revealed toward the end, so I will not give away anything here; suffice it to say even if you don't support the moral conclusions, you will learn from the ride and enjoy getting there.
I particuliarly enjoyed the author's style of writing. He balances philosophy with day to day perceptions and experiences. After stating each point, the author gives
brilliant examples and conceptual clarifications to illustrate the point. He also anticipates the reader's reactions and addresses them, along with some reactions this reader hadn't thought of. He is not stuffy or dry.
The author knows his material. I love this stuff, and I'm reasonably well read in several of the disciplines that he touches upon. Nonetheless, I was exposed to several new concepts ("memes" for example),new scientific experiments (the research on consciousness is eye opening), and new ways of reflecting on right/wrong. I agreed with his metaphysics, in fact I was in awe of his ability to describe and defend them, better than I could. I am still digesting his discourse on fairness, efficiency, and ethics, and for the most part, reluctantly agreeing. Whether or not you buy his metaphysics or his morality, you will find this book well written and a stimulating read.
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5.0 out of 5 stars The Meaning and Purpose of Life, November 30, 2005
By Mark Martin "-- Evolutionary Revolutionary --" (Newark, Delaware USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)
If you want to know why evolution programmed humans to have moral feelings of loyalty, compassion, gratitude, friendship and love, then this is the book for you.
If you want to understand evolution's inevitable goal for all advanced life (to practice a benevolent style of morality based on cooperation), then this is the book for you.
If you want to know why we are perfectly entitled to derive 'ought' from 'is' ..., if you want to fully understand the debate over determinism and free will ..., if you want to learn why evolution needed to develop human emotions and feelings of consciousness ..., if you want to understand the meaning of life, then this is the book for you.
This is the logical sequel to Richard Dawkins's book, "The Selfish Gene." By carrying on the perspective of the gene's-eye-view, this book reconciles evolution with human feelings, human will and human morality. It succeeds where Daniel Dennett's books fall short, by providing a clear prescription for living a purposeful and moral life.
The subjects in this book are deep, but the writing is clear and concise. The investment of time to read it is not insignificant, but the reading is easy and the payoff is enormous, whether or not you agree with the conclusions.
Buy it, read it and see for yourself. The world would be a much better place if everyone did.
The Mocking Memes: A Basis for Automated Intelligence (Paperback)
by Evan Louis Sheehan
All scientific evidence supports the astonishing hypothesis that minds are brains and brains are biological machines. But, then, what sort of neural architecture accounts for the human ability to think? The answer logically follows from another astonishing hypothesis: There is no source of creativity anywhere in the universe other than the process of evolution. Such is the simple premise on which this book's description of all intelligence is based. Human thinking is thus reduced to a mechanistic process of neural firing patterns evolving. In this unique yet simple model of mind, memes are the currency of creative thought. All sorts of intelligence, from the creation of the universe all the way down to human thoughts, are explained as evolving patterns.
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* Paperback: 332 pages
* Publisher: AuthorHouse (October 11, 2006)
* Language: English
* ISBN-10: 1425961606
* ISBN-13: 978-1425961602
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Although the ancient Roman holiday of Floralia, celebrated by the set of games and theatrical presentations known as the Ludi Florales, began in April, it was really an ancient May Day celebration. Flora, the Roman goddess in whose honor the festival was held, was a goddess of flowers, which generally begin to bloom in the spring. The holiday for Flora (as officially determined by Julius Caesar when he fixed the Roman calendar) ran from April 28 to May 3.
Roman public games (ludi) were financed by minor public magistrates known as aediles. The curule aediles produced the Ludi Florales. The position of curule aedile was originally (365 B.C.) limited to patricians, but was later opened up to plebeians. The ludi could be very expensive for the aediles, who used the games as a way of winning the affection and votes of the people. In this way, the aediles hoped to ensure victory in future elections for higher office after they had finished their year as aediles.
The Floralia festival began in Rome in 238 B.C., to please the goddess Flora into protecting the blossoms. http://www.myface.com/index.php?do=/public/account/submit/add-blog/added_3049/
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The Floralia fell out of favor and was discontinued until 173 B.C., when the senate, concerned with wind, hail, and other damage to the flowers, ordered Flora's celebration reinstated as the Ludi Florales.
The Ludi Florales included theatrical entertainment, including mimes, naked actresses and prostitutes. In the Renaissance, some writers thought that Flora had been a human prostitute who was turned into a goddess, possibly because of the licentiousness of the Ludi Florales or because, according to) David Lupher, Flora was a common name for prostitutes in ancient Rome.
The celebration in honor of Flora included floral wreaths worn in the hair much like modern participants in May Day celebrations. After the theatrical performances, the celebration continued in the Circus Maximus, where animals were set free and beans scattered to insure fertility.
I. Of my grandfather Verus I have learned to be gentle and meek, and to refrain from all anger and passion. From the fame and memory of him that begot me I have learned both shamefastness and manlike behaviour. Of my mother I have learned to be religious, and bountiful; and to forbear, not only to do, but to intend any evil; to content myself with a spare diet, and to fly all such excess as is incidental to great wealth. Of my great-grandfather, both to frequent public schools and auditories, and to get me good and able teachers at home; and that I ought not to think much, if upon such occasions, I were at excessive charges.
He who raised Marcus Aurelius
Avoid addiction to team sports
Work willingly
Limit wants and needs
Self-sufficiency
Truth
II. Of him that brought me up, not to be fondly addicted to either of the two great factions of the coursers in the circus, called Prasini, and Veneti: nor in the amphitheatre partially to favour any of the gladiators, or fencers, as either the Parmularii, or the Secutores. Moreover, to endure labour; nor to need many things; when I have anything to do, to do it myself rather than by others; not to meddle with many businesses; and not easily to admit of any slander.
III. Of Diognetus,
Diognetus
Avoid gullibility, keeping birds for sport, taking offense
Pursue philosophy
not to busy myself about vain things, and not easily to believe those things, which are commonly spoken, by such as take upon them to work wonders, and by sorcerers, or prestidigitators, and impostors; concerning the power of charms, and their driving out of demons, or evil spirits; and the like. Not to keep quails for the game; nor to be mad after such things. http://louisbjbsheehan.blogspot.com/
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Not to be offended with other men's liberty of speech, and to apply myself unto philosophy. Him also I must thank, that ever I heard first Bacchius, then Tandasis and Marcianus, and that I did write dialogues in my youth; and that I took liking to the philosophers' little couch and skins, and such other things, which by the Grecian discipline are proper to those who profess philosophy.
IV.
Rusticus
Showed him that his life should be improved and that his pursuit of philosophy should be without ostentation
Forgiveness
Avoid reading superficially, especially of Epictetus
To Rusticus I am beholding, that I first entered into the conceit that my life wanted some redress and cure. And then, that I did not fall into the ambition of ordinary sophists, either to write tracts concerning the common theorems, or to exhort men unto virtue and the study of philosophy by public orations; as also that I never by way of ostentation did affect to show myself an active able man, for any kind of bodily exercises. And that I gave over the study of rhetoric and poetry, and of elegant neat language. That I did not use to walk about the house in my long robe, nor to do any such things. Moreover I learned of him to write letters without any affectation, or curiosity; such as that was, which by him was written to my mother from Sinuessa: and to be easy and ready to be reconciled, and well pleased again with them that had offended me, as soon as any of them would be content to seek unto me again. To read with diligence; not to rest satisfied with a light and superficial knowledge, nor quickly to assent to things commonly spoken of: whom also I must thank that ever I lighted upon Epictetus his Hypomnemata, or moral commentaries and common-factions: which also he gave me of his own.
V.
Apollonius
Liberty
Take losses in stride and favors graciously
From Apollonius, true liberty, and unvariable steadfastness, and not to regard anything at all, though never so little, but right and reason: and always, whether in the sharpest pains, or after the loss of a child, or in long diseases, to be still the same man; who also was a present and visible example unto me, that it was possible for the same man to be both vehement and remiss: a man not subject to be vexed, and offended with the incapacity of his scholars and auditors in his lectures and expositions; and a true pattern of a man who of all his good gifts and faculties, least esteemed in himself, that his excellent skill and ability to teach and persuade others the common theorems and maxims of the Stoic philosophy. Of him also I learned how to receive favours and kindnesses (as commonly they are accounted:) from friends, so that I might not become obnoxious unto them, for them, nor more yielding upon occasion, than in right I ought; and yet so that I should not pass them neither, as an unsensible and unthankful man.
VI.
Sextus
Living according to nature, without affectation, accomodating to all sorts of people
Apathia without anger
Of Sextus, mildness and the pattern of a family governed with paternal affection; and a purpose to live according to nature: to be grave without affectation: to observe carefully the several dispositions of my friends, not to be offended with idiots, nor unseasonably to set upon those that are carried with the vulgar opinions, with the theorems, and tenets of philosophers: his conversation being an example how a man might accommodate himself to all men and companies; so that though his company were sweeter and more pleasing than any flatterer's cogging and fawning; yet was it at the same time most respected and reverenced: who also had a proper happiness and faculty, rationally and methodically to find out, and set in order all necessary determinations and instructions for a man's life. A man without ever the least appearance of anger, or any other passion; able at the same time most exactly to observe the Stoic Apathia, or unpassionateness, and yet to be most tender-hearted: ever of good credit; and yet almost without any noise, or rumour: very learned, and yet making little show.
VII.
Alexander the Grammarian
Be gentle in correcting others
From Alexander the Grammarian, to be un-reprovable myself, and not reproachfully to reprehend any man for a barbarism, or a solecism, or any false pronunciation, but dextrously by way of answer, or testimony, or confirmation of the same matter (taking no notice of the word) to utter it as it should have been spoken; or by some other such close and indirect admonition, handsomely and civilly to tell him of it.
VIII.
Fronto
tyrants filled with envy and hypocrisy, the nobly born lack affection
Of Fronto, to how much envy and fraud and hypocrisy the state of a tyrannous king is subject unto, and how they who are commonly called [Eupatridas Gk.], i.e. nobly born, are in some sort incapable, or void of natural affection.
IX.
Alexander the Platonic
Not to put off friends with the pretense of other important business
Of Alexander the Platonic, not often nor without great necessity to say, or to write to any man in a letter, 'I am not at leisure'; nor in this manner still to put off those duties, which we owe to our friends and acquaintances (to every one in his kind) under pretence of urgent affairs.
X.
Catulus
Listen to a friend's criticism, speak well of teachers, love one's children
Of Catulus, not to contemn any friend's expostulation, though unjust, but to strive to reduce him to his former disposition: freely and heartily to speak well of all my masters upon any occasion, as it is reported of Domitius, and Athenodotus: and to love my children with true affection.
XI.
Brother Severus
Loving to all in the household
Seek justice and equality in government
Be generous
Be open with friends
From my brother Severus, to be kind and loving to all them of my house and family; by whom also I came to the knowledge of Thrasea and Helvidius, and Cato, and Dio, and Brutus. He it was also that did put me in the first conceit and desire of an equal commonwealth, administered by justice and equality; and of a kingdom wherein should be regarded nothing more than the good and welfare of the subjects. Of him also, to observe a constant tenor, (not interrupted, with any other cares and distractions,) in the study and esteem of philosophy: to be bountiful and liberal in the largest measure; always to hope the best; and to be confident that my friends love me. In whom I moreover observed open dealing towards those whom he reproved at any time, and that his friends might without all doubt or much observation know what he would, or would not, so open and plain was he.
XII.
Claudius Maximus
Cheerfulness in adversity
Work diligently, without complaint
Be good, forgiving, honest, and pleasant
From Claudius Maximus, in all things to endeavour to have power of myself, and in nothing to be carried about; to be cheerful and courageous in all sudden chances and accidents, as in sicknesses: to love mildness, and moderation, and gravity: and to do my business, whatsoever it be, thoroughly, and without querulousness. http://louiscjcsheehan.blogspot.com/
Whatsoever he said, all men believed him that as he spake, so he thought, and whatsoever he did, that he did it with a good intent. His manner was, never to wonder at anything; never to be in haste, and yet never slow: nor to be perplexed, or dejected, or at any time unseemly, or excessively to laugh: nor to be angry, or suspicious, but ever ready to do good, and to forgive, and to speak truth; and all this, as one that seemed rather of himself to have been straight and right, than ever to have been rectified or redressed; neither was there any man that ever thought himself undervalued by him, or that could find in his heart, to think himself a better man than he. He would also be very pleasant and gracious.
XIII.
Father
Meekness
diligence, impartiality, chastity regarding youth
Take time to deliberate
Cheerfulness
Repressed flattery
Careful financial accounts
Sociable
Philosophical
Care of his body
Consultation with experts
Not concerned with glory
Baths at appropriate times
Not concerned with external beauty
Moderation in all things
In my father, I observed his meekness; his constancy without wavering in those things, which after a due examination and deliberation, he had determined. How free from all vanity he carried himself in matter of honour and dignity, (as they are esteemed:) his laboriousness and assiduity, his readiness to hear any man, that had aught to say tending to any common good: how generally and impartially he would give every man his due; his skill and knowledge, when rigour or extremity, or when remissness or moderation was in season; how he did abstain from all unchaste love of youths; his moderate condescending to other men's occasions as an ordinary man, neither absolutely requiring of his friends, that they should wait upon him at his ordinary meals, nor that they should of necessity accompany him in his journeys; and that whensoever any business upon some necessary occasions was to be put off and omitted before it could be ended, he was ever found when he went about it again, the same man that he was before. His accurate examination of things in consultations, and patient hearing of others. He would not hastily give over the search of the matter, as one easy to be satisfied with sudden notions and apprehensions. His care to preserve his friends; how neither at any time he would carry himself towards them with disdainful neglect, and grow weary of them; nor yet at any time be madly fond of them. His contented mind in all things, his cheerful countenance, his care to foresee things afar off, and to take order for the least, without any noise or clamour. Moreover how all acclamations and flattery were repressed by him: how carefully he observed all things necessary to the government, and kept an account of the common expenses, and how patiently he did abide that he was reprehended by some for this his strict and rigid kind of dealing. How he was neither a superstitious worshipper of the gods, nor an ambitious pleaser of men, or studious of popular applause; but sober in all things, and everywhere observant of that which was fitting; no affecter of novelties: in those things which conduced to his ease and convenience, (plenty whereof his fortune did afford him,) without pride and bragging, yet with all freedom and liberty: so that as he did freely enjoy them without any anxiety or affectation when they were present; so when absent, he found no want of them. Moreover, that he was never commended by any man, as either a learned acute man, or an obsequious officious man, or a fine orator; but as a ripe mature man, a perfect sound man; one that could not endure to be flattered; able to govern both himself and others. Moreover, how much he did honour all true philosophers, without upbraiding those that were not so; his sociableness, his gracious and delightful conversation, but never unto satiety; his care of his body within bounds and measure, not as one that desired to live long, or over-studious of neatness, and elegancy; and yet not as one that did not regard it: so that through his own care and providence, he seldom needed any inward physic, or outward applications: but especially how ingeniously he would yield to any that had obtained any peculiar faculty, as either eloquence, or the knowledge of the laws, or of ancient customs, or the like; and how he concurred with them, in his best care and endeavour that every one of them might in his kind, for that wherein he excelled, be regarded and esteemed: and although he did all things carefully after the ancient customs of his forefathers, yet even of this was he not desirous that men should take notice, that he did imitate ancient customs. http://louisgjgsheehan.blogspot.com/
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Again, how he was not easily moved and tossed up and down, but loved to be constant, both in the same places and businesses; and how after his great fits of headache he would return fresh and vigorous to his wonted affairs. Again, that secrets he neither had many, nor often, and such only as concerned public matters: his discretion and moderation, in exhibiting of the public sights and shows for the pleasure and pastime of the people: in public buildings. congiaries, and the like. In all these things, having a respect unto men only as men, and to the equity of the things themselves, and not unto the glory that might follow. Never wont to use the baths at unseasonable hours; no builder; never curious, or solicitous, either about his meat, or about the workmanship, or colour of his clothes, or about anything that belonged to external beauty. In all his conversation, far from all inhumanity, all boldness, and incivility, all greediness and impetuosity; never doing anything with such earnestness, and intention, that a man could say of him, that he did sweat about it: but contrariwise, all things distinctly, as at leisure; without trouble; orderly, soundly, and agreeably. A man might have applied that to him, which is recorded of Socrates, that he knew how to want, and to enjoy those things, in the want whereof, most men show themselves weak; and in the fruition, intemperate: but to hold out firm and constant, and to keep within the compass of true moderation and sobriety in either estate, is proper to a man, who hath a perfect and invincible soul; such as he showed himself in the sickness of Maximus.
XIV.
The Gods
Good relatives, wife, and family
Ability to avoid offending the gods
Maintenance of chastity until a reasonable time
Ability to enjoy living simply
Healthy children
Only modest talent in areas that might have led him astray
Ability to help others
Avoidance of sophists
From the gods I received that I had good grandfathers, and parents, a good sister, good masters, good domestics, loving kinsmen, almost all that I have; and that I never through haste and rashness transgressed against any of them, notwithstanding that my disposition was such, as that such a thing (if occasion had been) might very well have been committed by me, but that It was the mercy of the gods, to prevent such a concurring of matters and occasions, as might make me to incur this blame. That I was not long brought up by the concubine of my father; that I preserved the flower of my youth. That I took not upon me to be a man before my time, but rather put it off longer than I needed. That I lived under the government of my lord and father, who would take away from me all pride and vainglory, and reduce me to that conceit and opinion that it was not impossible for a prince to live in the court without a troop of guards and followers, extraordinary apparel, such and such torches and statues, and other like particulars of state and magnificence; but that a man may reduce and contract himself almost to the state of a private man, and yet for all that not to become the more base and remiss in those public matters and affairs, wherein power and authority is requisite. That I have had such a brother, who by his own example might stir me up to think of myself; and by his respect and love, delight and please me. That I have got ingenuous children, and that they were not born distorted, nor with any other natural deformity. That I was no great proficient in the study of rhetoric and poetry, and of other faculties, which perchance I might have dwelt upon, if I had found myself to go on in them with success. That I did by times prefer those, by whom I was brought up, to such places and dignities, which they seemed unto me most to desire; and that I did not put them off with hope and expectation, that (since that they were yet but young) I would do the same hereafter. That I ever knew Apollonius and Rusticus, and Maximus. That I have had occasion often and effectually to consider and meditate with myself, concerning that life which is according to nature, what the nature and manner of it is: so that as for the gods and such suggestions, helps and inspirations, as might be expected from them, nothing did hinder, but that I might have begun long before to live according to nature; or that even now that I was not yet partaker and in present possession of that life, that I myself (in that I did not observe those inward motions, and suggestions, yea and almost plain and apparent instructions and admonitions of the gods,) was the only cause of it. That my body in such a life, hath been able to hold out so long. That I never had to do with Benedicta and Theodotus, yea and afterwards when I fell into some fits of love, I was soon cured. That having been often displeased with Rusticus, I never did him anything for which afterwards I had occasion to repent. That it being so that my mother was to die young, yet she lived with me all her latter years. That as often as I had a purpose to help and succour any that either were poor, or fallen into some present necessity, I never was answered by my officers that there was not ready money enough to do it; and that I myself never had occasion to require the like succour from any other. That I have such a wife, so obedient, so loving, so ingenuous. That I had choice of fit and able men, to whom I might commit the bringing up of my children. That by dreams I have received help, as for other things, so in particular, how I might stay my casting of blood, and cure my dizziness, as that also that happened to thee in Cajeta, as unto Chryses when he prayed by the seashore. And when I did first apply myself to philosophy, that I did not fall into the hands of some sophists, or spent my time either in reading the manifold volumes of ordinary philosophers, nor in practising myself in the solution of arguments and fallacies, nor dwelt upon the studies of the meteors, and other natural curiosities. All these things without the assistance of the gods, and fortune, could not have been.
XV.
All men are the same by virtue of reason and the divine spark
In the country of the Quadi at Granua, these. Betimes in the morning say to thyself, This day I shalt have to do with an idle curious man, with an unthankful man, a railer, a crafty, false, or an envious man; an unsociable uncharitable man. All these ill qualities have happened unto them, through ignorance of that which is truly good and truly bad. http://louishjhsheehan.blogspot.com/
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But I that understand the nature of that which is good, that it only is to be desired, and of that which is bad, that it only is truly odious and shameful: who know moreover, that this transgressor, whosoever he be, is my kinsman, not by the same blood and seed, but by participation of the same reason, and of the same divine particle; How can I either be hurt by any of those, since it is not in their power to make me incur anything that is truly reproachful? or angry, and ill affected towards him, who by nature is so near unto me? for we are all born to be fellow-workers, as the feet, the hands, and the eyelids; as the rows of the upper and under teeth: for such therefore to be in opposition, is against nature; and what is it to chafe at, and to be averse from, but to be in opposition?
XVI.
Don't be distracted by books
Whatsoever I am, is either flesh, or life, or that which we commonly call the mistress and overruling part of man; reason. Away with thy books, suffer not thy mind any more to be distracted, and carried to and fro; for it will not be; but as even now ready to die, think little of thy flesh: blood, bones, and a skin; a pretty piece of knit and twisted work, consisting of nerves, veins and arteries; think no more of it, than so. And as for thy life, consider what it is; a wind; not one constant wind neither, but every moment of an hour let out, and sucked in again. The third, is thy ruling part; and here consider; Thou art an old man; suffer not that excellent part to be brought in subjection, and to become slavish: suffer it not to be drawn up and down with unreasonable and unsociable lusts and motions, as it were with wires and nerves; suffer it not any more, either to repine at anything now present, or to fear and fly anything to come, which the destiny hath appointed thee.
XVII.
What comes from god is full of providence
Whatsoever proceeds from the gods immediately, that any man will grant totally depends from their divine providence. As for those things that are commonly said to happen by fortune, even those must be conceived to have dependence from nature, or from that first and general connection, and concatenation of all those things, which more apparently by the divine providence are administered and brought to pass. All things flow from thence: and whatsoever it is that is, is both necessary, and conducing to the whole (part of which thou art), and whatsoever it is that is requisite and necessary for the preservation of the general, must of necessity for every particular nature, be good and behoveful. And as for the whole, it is preserved, as by the perpetual mutation and conversion of the simple elements one into another, so also by the mutation, and alteration of things mixed and compounded. Let these things suffice thee; let them be always unto thee, as thy general rules and precepts. As for thy thirst after books, away with it with all speed, that thou die not murmuring and complaining, but truly meek and well satisfied, and from thy heart thankful unto the gods.
Sophocles
Born at Colonos probably 495 B.C. Died 406 B.C.
PHILOCTETES
THE PERSONS
ODYSSEUS.
NEOPTOLEMUS.
CHORUS of Mariners.
PHILOCTETES.
Messenger, disguised as a Merchantman.
HERACLES, appearing from the sky.
SCENE. A desert shore of the Island of Lemnos.
PHILOCTETES
ODYSSEUS. NEOPTOLEMUS.
ODYSSEUS. This coast of sea-girt Lemnos, where we stand,
Is uninhabited, untrodden of men.
And here, O noble son of noblest sire,
Achilles-born Neoptolemus, I erewhile, --
Ordered by those who had command, -- cast forth
Trachinian Philoctetes, Poeas' son,
His foot dark-dripping with a rankling wound;
When with wild cries, that frighted holy rest,
Filling the camp, he troubled every rite,
That none might handle sacrifice, or pour
Wine-offering, but his noise disturbed our peace.
But why these words? http://louiskjksheehan.blogspot.com/
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No moment this for talk,
Lest he discern my coming, and I lose
The scheme, wherewith I think to catch him soon.
Now most behoves thy service, to explore
This headland for a cave with double mouth,
Whose twofold aperture, on wintry days,
Gives choice of sunshine, and in summer noons
The breeze wafts slumber through the airy cell.
Then, something lower down, upon the left,
Unless 'tis dried, thine eye may note a spring.
Go near now silently, and make me know
If still he persevere, and hold this spot,
Or have roamed elsewhere, that informed of this
I may proceed with what remains to say,
And we may act in concert.
NEOPTOLEMUS. Lord Odysseus,
Thy foremost errand will not task me far.
Methinks I see the cave whereof thou speakest.
OD. Where? let me see it. Above there, or below?
NEO. Yonder, above. And yet I hear no tread.
[Neoptolemus climbs up to the cave]
OD. Look if he be not lodged in slumber there.
NEO. I find no inmate, but an empty room.
OD. What? no provision for a dwelling-place?
NEO. A bed of leaves for some one harbouring here.
OD. Nought else beneath the roof? Is all forlorn?
NEO. A cup of wood, some untaught craftsman's skill,
And, close at hand, these embers of a fire.
OD. That store is his. I read the token clear.
NEO. Oh! and these festering rags give evidence,
Steeped as with dressing some malignant sore.
OD. The man inhabits here: I know it now.
And sure he's not far off. How can he range,
Whose limb drags heavy with an ancient harm?
But he's gone, either to bring forage home,
Or where he hath found some plant of healing power.
Send therefore thine attendant to look forth,
Lest unawares he find me. All our host
Were not so fair a prize for him as I.
NEO. My man is going, and shall watch the path.
What more dost thou require of me? Speak on.
OD. Son of Achilles, know that thou art come
To serve us nobly, not with strength alone,
But, faithful to thy mission, if so be,
To do things strange, unwonted to thine ear.
NEO. What dost thou bid me?
OD. 'Tis thy duty now
To entrap the mind of Poeas' son with words.
When he shall ask thee, who and whence thou art,
Declare thy name and father. 'Tis not that
I charge thee to conceal. But for thy voyage,
'Tis homeward, leaving the Achaean host,
With perfect hatred hating them, because
They who had drawn thee with strong prayers from home,
Their hope for taking Troy, allowed thee not
Thy just demand to have thy father's arms,
But, e'er thy coming, wrongly gave them o'er
Unto Odysseus: and thereon launch forth
With boundless execration against me.
That will not pain me, but if thou reject
This counsel, thou wilt trouble all our host,
Since, if his bow shall not be ta'en, thy life
Will ne'er be crowned through Troy's discomfiture.
Now let me show, why thine approach to him
Is safe and trustful as mine cannot be
Thou didst sail forth, not to redeem thine oath,
Nor by constraint, nor with the foremost band.
All which reproaches I must bear: and he,
But seeing me, while master of his bow,
Will slay me, and my ruin will be thine.
This point then craves our cunning, to acquire
By subtle means the irresistible bow --
Thy nature was not framed, I know it well,
For speaking falsehood, or contriving harm.
Yet, since the prize of victory is so dear,
Endure it -- We'll be just another day
But now, for one brief hour, devote thyself
To serve me without shame, and then for aye
Hereafter be the pearl of righteousness. http://louis2j2sheehan2esquire.blogspot.com/
NEO. The thing that, being named, revolts mine ear,
Son of Laërtes, I abhor to do
'Tis not my nature, no, nor, as they tell,
My father's, to work aught by craft and guile.
I'll undertake to bring him in by force,
Not by deceit. For, sure, with his one foot,
He cannot be a match for all our crew
Being sent, my lord, to serve thee, I am loth
To seem rebellious. But I rather choose
To offend with honour, than to win by wrong.
OD. Son of a valiant sire, I, too, in youth,
Had once a slow tongue and an active hand.
But since I have proved the world, I clearly see
Words and not deeds give mastery over men.
NEO. What then is thy command? To lie? No more?
OD. To entangle Philoctetes with deceit.
NEO. Why through deceit? May not persuasion fetch him?
OD. Never. And force as certainly will fail.
NEO. What lends him such assurance of defence?
OD. Arrows, the unerring harbingers of Death.
NEO. Then to go near him is a perilous thing.
OD. Unless with subtlety, as I have said.
NEO. And is not lying shameful to thy soul?
OD. Not if by lying I can save my soul.
NEO. How must one look in speaking such a word?
OD. Where gain invites, this shrinking is not good.
NEO. What gain I through his coming back to Troy?
OD. His arms alone have power to take Troy-town.
NEO. Then am not I the spoiler, as ye said?
OD. Thou without them, they without thee, are powerless.
NEO. If it be so, they must be sought and won.
OD. Yea, for in this two prizes will be thine.
NEO. What? When I learn them, I will not refuse.
OD. Wisdom and valour joined in one good name.
NEO. Shame, to the winds! Come, I will do this thing.
OD. Say, dost thou bear my bidding full in mind?
NEO. Doubt not, since once for all I have embraced it.
OD. Thou, then, await him here. I will retire,
For fear my hated presence should be known,
And take back our attendant to the ship.
And then once more, should ye appear to waste
The time unduly, I will send again
This same man hither in disguise, transformed
To the strange semblance of a merchantman;
From dark suggestion of whose crafty tongue,
Thou, O my son, shalt gather timely counsel.
Now to my ship. This charge I leave to thee.
May secret Hermes guide us to our end,
And civic Pallas, named of victory,
The sure protectress of my devious way.
CHORUS (entering).
Strange in the stranger land,
What shall I speak? What hide
From a heart suspicious of ill?
Tell me, O master mine!
Wise above all is the man,
Peerless in searching thought,
Who with the Zeus-given wand
Wieldeth a Heaven-sent power.
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This unto thee, dear son,
Fraught with ancestral might,
This to thy life hath come.
Wherefore I bid thee declare,
What must I do for thy need?
NEO. Even now methinks thou longest to espy
Near ocean's marge the place where he doth lie.
Gaze without fear. But when the traveller stern,
Who from this roof is parted, shall return,
Advancing still as I the signal give,
To serve each moment's mission thou shalt strive.
CH. That, O my son, from of old
Hath been my care, to take note
What by thy beck'ning is told;
Still thy success to promote.
But for our errand to-day
Behoves thee, master, to say
Where is the hearth of his home;
Or where even now doth he roam?
O tell me, lest all unaware
He spring like a wolf from his lair
And I by surprise should be ta'en,
Where doth he move or remain,
Here lodging, or wandering away?
NEO. Thou seëst yon double doorway of his cell,
Poor habitation of the rock.
CH. 2. But tell
Where is the pain-worn wight himself abroad?
NEO. To me 'tis clear, that, in his quest for food,
Here, not far off, he trails yon furrowed path.
For, so 'tis told, this mode the sufferer hath
Of sustenance, oh hardness! bringing low
Wild creatures with wing'd arrows from his bow;
Nor findeth healer for his troublous woe.
CH. I feel his misery.
With no companion eye,
Far from all human care,
He pines with fell disease;
Each want he hourly sees
Awakening new despair.
How can he bear it still?
O cruel Heavens! O pain
Of that afflicted mortal train
Whose life sharp sorrows fill!
Born in a princely hall,
Highest, perchance, of all,
Now lies he comfortless
Alone in deep distress,
'Mongst rough and dappled brutes,
With pangs and hunger worn;
While from far distance shoots,
On airy pinion borne,
The unbridled Echo, still replying
To his most bitter crying.
NEO. At nought of this I marvel -- for if I
Judge rightly, there assailed him from on high
That former plague through Chrysa's cruel sting[1]:
And if to-day he suffer anything
With none to soothe, it must be from the will
Of some great God, so caring to fulfil
The word of prophecy, lest he should bend
On Troy the shaft no mortal may forfend,
Before the arrival of Troy's destined hour,
When she must fall, o'er-mastered by their power.
CH. 1. Hush, my son!
NEO. Why so?
CH. 1. A sound
Gendered of some mortal woe,
Started from the neighbouring ground.
Here, or there? Ah! now I know.
Hark! 'tis the voice of one in pain,
Travelling hardly, the deep strain
Of human anguish, all too clear,
That smites my heart, that wounds mine ear.
CH. 2. From far it peals. But thou, my son!
NEO. What?
CH. 2. Think again. http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.blogspot.com/
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He moveth nigh:
He holds the region: not with tone
Of piping shepherd's rural minstrelsy,
But belloweth his far cry,
Stumbling perchance with mortal pain,
Or else in wild amaze,
As he our ship surveys
Unwonted on the inhospitable main.
Enter Philoctetes.
PHILOCTETES. Ho!
What men are ye that to this desert shore,
Harbourless, uninhabited, are come
On shipboard? Of what country or what race
Shall I pronounce ye? For your outward garb
Is Grecian, ever dearest to this heart
That hungers now to hear your voices' tune.
Ah! do not fear me, do not shrink away
From my wild looks: but, pitying one so poor,
Forlorn and desolate in nameless woe,
Speak, if with friendly purpose ye are come.
Oh answer! 'Tis not meet that I should lose
This kindness from your lips, or ye from mine.
NEO. Then know this first, O stranger, as thou wouldest,
That we are Greeks.
PHI. O dear, dear name! Ah me!
In all these years, once, only once, I hear it!
My son, what fairest gale hath wafted thee?
What need hath brought thee to the shore? What mission?
Declare all this, that I may know thee well.
NEO. The sea-girt Scyros is my native home.
Thitherward I make voyage: -- Achilles' son,
Named Neoptolemus. -- I have told thee all.
PHI. Dear is that shore to me, dear is thy father
O ancient Lycomedes' foster-child,
Whence cam'st thou hither? How didst thou set forth?
NEO. From Troy we made our course in sailing hither.
PHI. How? Sure thou wast not with us, when at first
We launched our vessels on the Troyward way?
NEO. Hadst thou a share in that adventurous toil?
PHI. And know'st thou not whom thou behold'st in me,
Young boy?
NEO. How should I know him whom I ne'er
Set eye on?
PHI. Hast not even heard my name,
Nor echoing rumour of my ruinous woe?
NEO. Nay, I know nought of all thy questioning.
PHI. How full of griefs am I, how Heaven-abhorred,
When of my piteous state no faintest sound
Hath reached my home, or any Grecian land!
But they, who pitilessly cast me forth,
Keep silence and are glad, while this my plague
Blooms ever, and is strengthened more and more.
Boy, great Achilles' offspring, in this form
Thou seest the man, of whom, methinks, erewhile
Thou hast been told, to whom the Hercúlean bow
Descended, Philoctetes, Poeas' son;
Whom the two generals and the Ithacan king
Cast out thus shamefully forlorn, afflicted
With the fierce malady and desperate wound
Made by the cruel basilisk's murderous tooth.
With this for company they left me, child!
Exposed upon this shore, deserted, lone.
From seaward Chrysa came they with their fleet
And touched at Lemnos. I had fallen to rest
From the long tossing, in a shadowy cave
On yonder cliff by the shore. Gladly they saw,
And left me, having set forth for my need,
Poor man, some scanty rags, and a thin store
Of provender. Such food be theirs, I pray!
Imagine, O my son, when they were gone,
What wakening, what arising, then was mine;
What weeping, what lamenting of my woe!
When I beheld the ships, wherewith I sailed,
Gone, one and all! and no man in the place,
None to bestead me, none to comfort me
In my sore sickness. http://louis4j4sheehan4esquire.blogspot.com/
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And where'er I looked,
Nought but distress was present with me still.
No lack of that, for one thing! -- Ah! my son,
Time passed, and there I found myself alone
Within my narrow lodging, forced to serve
Each pressing need. For body's sustenance
This bow supplied me with sufficient store,
Wounding the feathered doves, and when the shaft,
From the tight string, had struck, myself, ay me!
Dragging this foot, would crawl to my swift prey.
Then water must be fetched, and in sharp frost
Wood must be found and broken, -- all by me.
Nor would fire come unbidden, but with flint
From flints striking dim sparks, I hammered forth
The struggling flame that keeps the life in me.
For houseroom with the single help of fire
Gives all I need, save healing for my sore.
Now learn, my son, the nature of this isle.
No mariner puts in here willingly.
For it hath neither moorage, nor sea-port,
For traffic or kind shelter or good cheer.
Not hitherward do prudent men make voyage.
Perchance one may have touched against his will.
Many strange things may happen in long time.
These, when they come, in words have pitied me,
And given me food, or raiment, in compassion.
But none is willing, when I speak thereof,
To take me safely home. Wherefore I pine
Now this tenth year, in famine and distress,
Feeding the hunger of my ravenous plague.
Such deeds, my son, the Atridae, and the might
Of sage Odysseus, have performed on me.
Wherefore may all the Olympian gods, one day,
Plague them with stern requital for my wrong!
CH. Methinks my feeling for thee, Poeas' child,
Is like that of thy former visitants.
NEO. I, too, a witness to confirm his words,
Know them for verities, since I have found
The Atridae and Odysseus evil men.
PHI. Art thou, too, wroth with the all-pestilent sons
Of Atreus? Have they given thee cause to grieve?
NEO. Would that my hand might ease the wrath I feel!
Then Sparta and Mycenae should be ware
That Scyros too breeds valiant sons for war.
PHI. Brave youth! I love thee. Tell me the great cause
Why thou inveighest against them with such heat?
NEO. O son of Poeas, hardly shall I tell
What outrage I endured when I had come;
Yet I will speak it. When the fate of death
O'ertook Achilles --
PHI. Out, alas! no more!
Hold, till thou first hast made me clearly know,
Is Peleus' offspring dead?
NEO. Alas! he is,
Slain by no mortal, felled by Phoebus' shaft:
So men reported --
PHI. Well, right princely was he!
And princely is he who slew him. Shall I mourn
Him first, or wait till I have heard thy tale?
NEO. Methinks thou hast thyself enough to mourn,
Without the burden of another's woe.
PHI. Well spoken. Then renew thine own complaint,
And tell once more wherein they insulted thee.
NEO. There came to fetch me, in a gallant ship,
Odysseus and the fosterer of my sire[2],
Saying, whether soothly, or in idle show,
That, since my father perished, it was known
None else but I should take Troy's citadel. http://louis6j6sheehan6esquire.blogspot.com/
Such words from them, my friend, thou may'st believe,
Held me not long from making voyage with speed,
Chiefly through longing for my father's corse,
To see him yet unburied, -- for I ne'er
Had seen him[3]. Then, besides, 'twas a fair cause,
If, by my going, I should vanquish Troy.
One day I had sailed, and on the second came
To sad Sigeum with wind-favoured speed,
When straightway all the host, surrounding me
As I set foot on shore, saluted me,
And swore the dead Achilles was in life,
Their eyes being witness, when they looked on me.
He lay there in his shroud: but I, unhappy,
Soon ending lamentation for the dead,
Went near to those Atridae, as to friends,
To obtain my father's armour and all else
That had been his. And then, -- alas the while,
That men should be so hard! -- they spake this word:
'Seed of Achilles, thou may'st freely take
All else thy father owned, but for those arms,
Another wields them now, Laërtes' son.'
Tears rushed into mine eyes, and in hot wrath
I straightway rose, and bitterly outspake:
'O miscreant! What? And have ye dared to give
Mine arms to some man else, unknown to me?'
Then said Odysseus, for he chanced to be near,
'Yea, child, and justly have they given me these.
I saved them and their master in the field.'
Then in fierce anger all at once I launched
All terms of execration at his head,
Bating no word, being maddened by the thought
That I should lose this heirloom, -- and to him!
He, at this pass, though not of wrathful mood,
Stung by such utterance, made rejoinder thus:
'Thou wast not with us here, but wrongfully
Didst bide afar. And, since thou mak'st so bold,
I tell thee, never shalt thou, as thou sayest,
Sail with these arms to Scyros.' -- Thus reviled,
With such an evil echo in mine ear,
I voyage homeward, robbed of mine own right
By that vile offset of an evil tree[4].
Yet less I blame him than the men in power.
For every multitude, be it army or state,
Takes tone from those who rule it, and all taint
Of disobedience from bad counsel springs.
I have spoken. May the Atridae's enemy
Be dear to Heaven, as he is loved by me!
CH. Mother of mightiest Zeus,
Feeder of all that live,
Who from thy mountainous breast
Rivers of gold dost give!
To thee, O Earth, I cried that shameful day,
When insolence from Atreus' sons went forth
Full on our lord: when they bestowed away
His father's arms to crown Odysseus' worth;
Thou, whom bull-slaughtering lions yoked bear,
O mighty mother, hear!
PHI. Your coming is commended by a grief
That makes you kindly welcome. http://louis7j7sheehan7esquire.blogspot.com/
For I feel
A chord that vibrates to your voice, and tells,
Thus have Odysseus and the Atridae wrought.
Full well I know, Odysseus' poisoned tongue
Shrinks from no mischief nor no guileful word
That leads to bad achievement in the end.
This moves not my main marvel, but if one
Saw this and bore it, -- Aias of the shield.
NEO. Ah, friend, he was no more. Had he but lived,
This robbery had ne'er been wrought on me.
PHI. What? Is he too departed?
NEO. He is dead.
The light no more beholds him.
PHI. Oh! alas!
But Tydeus' offspring, and the rascal birth
Laërtes bought of Sisyphus, they live:
I know it. For their death were to be wished.
NEO. Yea, be assured, they live and flourish high
Exalted in the host of Argive men.
PHI. And Nestor, my old friend, good aged man,
Is he yet living? Oft he would prevent
Their evils, by the wisdom of his thought.
NEO. He too is now in trouble, having lost
Antilochus, the comfort of his age.
PHI. There, there! In one brief word thou hast revealed
The mournful case of twain, whom I would last
Have chosen to hear of as undone. Ah me!
Where must one look? when these are dead, and he,
Odysseus, lives, -- and in a time like this,
That craves their presence, and his death for theirs.
NEO. He wrestles cleverly; but, O my friend,
Even ablest wits are ofttimes snared at last.
PHI. Tell me, I pray, what was become of him,
Patroclus, whom thy father loved so well?
NEO. He, too, was gone. I'll teach thee in a word
One truth for all. War doth not willingly
Snatch off the wicked, but still takes the good.
PHI. True! and to prove thy saying, I will inquire
The fate of a poor dastard, of mean worth,
But ever shrewd and nimble with his tongue.
NEO. Whom but Odysseus canst thou mean by this?
PHI. I meant not him. But there was one Thersites,
Who ne'er made conscience to stint speech, where all
Cried 'Silence!' Is he living, dost thou know?
NEO. I saw him not, but knew he was alive.
PHI. He must be: for no evil yet was crushed.
The Heavens will ever shield it. 'Tis their sport
To turn back all things rancorous and malign
From going down to the grave, and send instead
The good and true. Oh, how shall we commend
Such dealings, how defend them? When I praise
Things god-like, I find evil in the Gods.
NEO. I, O thou child of a Trachinian sire,
Henceforth will take good care, from far away
To look on Troy and Atreus' children twain.
Yea, where the trickster lords it o'er the just,
And goodness languishes and rascals rule,
-- Such courses I will nevermore endure.
But rock-bound Scyros henceforth shall suffice
To yield me full contentment in my home.
Now, to my vessel! And thou, Poeas' child,
Farewell, right heartily farewell! http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.blogspot.com/
May Heaven
Grant thy desire, and rid thee of thy plague!
Let us be going, that when God shall give
Fair voyage, that moment we may launch away.
PHI. My son, are ye now setting forth?
NEO. Our time
Bids us go near and look to sail erelong.
PHI. Now, by thy father, by thy mother, -- nay,
By all thy love e'er cherished in thy home,
Suppliant I beg thee, leave me not thus lone,
Forlorn in all my misery which thou seest,
In all thou hast heard of here surrounding me!
Stow me with other freightage. Full of care,
I know, and burdensome the charge may prove.
Yet venture! Surely to the noble mind
All shame is hateful and all kindness blest.
And shame would be thy meed, didst thou fail here
But, doing this, thou shalt have glorious fame,
When I return alive to Oeta's vale.
Come, 'tis the labour not of one whole day.
So thou durst take me, fling me where thou wilt
O' the ship, in hold, prow, stern, or wheresoe'er
I least may trouble those on board with me.
Ah! by great Zeus, the suppliant's friend, comply,
My son, be softened! See, where I am fall'n
Thus on my knees before thee, though so weak,
Crippled and powerless. Ah! forsake me not
Thus far from human footstep. Take me, take me!
If only to thy home, or to the town
Of old Chalcodon[5] in Euboea. -- From thence
I have not far to Oeta, and the ridge
Of Trachis, and Spercheius' lordly flood.
So thou shalt bless my father with my sight.
And yet long since I fear he may be gone.
For oft I sent him suppliant prayers by men
Who touched this isle, entreating him to fetch
And bear me safely home with his own crew.
But either he is dead, or else, methinks,
It well may be, my messengers made light
Of my concerns, and hastened onward home.
But now in thee I find both messenger
And convoy, thou wilt pity me and save.
For, well thou knowest, danger never sleeps,
And fear of dark reverse is always nigh.
Mortals, when free, should look where mischief lurks,
And in their happiest hour consider well
Their life, lest ruin unsuspected come.
CH. Pity him, O my king!
Many a crushing woe
He telleth, such as I pray
None of my friends may know.
And if, dear master, thou mislikest sore
Yon cruel-hearted lordly pair, I would,
Turning their plan of evil to his good,
On swift ship bear him to his native shore,
Meeting his heart's desire; and free thy path
From fear of heavenly wrath.
NEO. Thou mak'st small scruple here; but be advised:
Lest, when this plague on board shall weary thee,
Thy voice should alter from this liberal tone.
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CH. No, truly! Fear not thou shalt ever have
Just cause to utter such reproach on me.
NEO. Then sure 'twere shame, should I more backward prove
Than thou, to labour for the stranger's need.
Come, if thou wilt, let us make voyage, and he,
Let him set forth with speed. Our ship shall take him.
He shall not be refused. Only may Heaven
Lead safely hence and to our destined port!
PHI. O morning full of brightness! Kindest friend,
Sweet mariners, how can I make you feel,
In act, how dearly from my heart I love you!
Ye have won my soul. Let us be gone, my son, --
First having said farewell to this poor cave,
My homeless dwelling-place, that thou may'st know,
How barely I have lived, how firm my heart!
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Methinks another could not have endured
The very sight of what I bore. But I
Through strong necessity have conquered pain.
CH. Stay: let us understand. There come two men
A stranger, with a shipmate of thy crew.
When ye have heard them, ye may then go in.
[Enter Messenger, disguised as a merchantman].
MERCHANTMAN. Son of Achilles, my companion here,
Who with two more remained to guard thy ship,
Agreed to help me find thee where thou wert,
Since unexpectedly, through fortune's will,
I meet thee, mooring by the self-same shore.
For like a merchantman, with no great sail,
Making my course from Ilion to my home,
Grape-clustered Peparethos, when I heard
The mariners declare that one and all
Were of thy crew, I would not launch again,
Without a word, till we had told our news. --
Methinks thou knowest nought of thine own case,
What new devices of the Argive chiefs
Surround thee; nor devices only now,
But active deeds, no longer unperformed.
NEO. Well, stranger, for the kindness thou hast shown, --
Else were I base, -- my heart must thank thee still.
But tell me what thou meanest, that I may learn
What new-laid plot thou bring'st me from the camp.
MER. Old Phoenix, Acamas and Demophon
Are gone in thy pursuit with ships and men.
NEO. To bring me back with reasons or perforce?
MER. I know not. What I heard, I am here to tell.
NEO. How? And is this in act? Are they set forth
To please the Atridae, Phoenix and the rest?
MER. The thing is not to do, but doing now.
NEO. What kept Odysseus back, if this be so,
From going himself? Had he some cause for fear?
MER. He and the son of Tydeus, when our ship
Hoist sail, were gone to fetch another man.
NEO. For whom could he himself be sailing forth?
MER. For some one, -- but first tell me, whispering low
Whate'er thou speakest, -- who is this I see?
NEO. (speaking aloud).
This, sir, is Philoctetes the renowned.
MER. (aside to Neoptolemus).
Without more question, snatch thyself away
And sail forth from this land.
PHI. What saith he, boy?
Through what dark traffic is the mariner
Betraying me with whispering in thine ear?
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NEO. I have not caught it, but whate'er he speaks
He must speak openly to us and thee.
MER. Seed of Achilles, let me not offend
The army by my words! Full many a boon,
Being poor, I reap from them for service done.
NEO. The Atridae are my foes; the man you see
Is my fast friend, because he hates them sore.
Then, if you come in kindness, you must hide
Nothing from him or me of all thou hast heard.
MER. Look what thou doest, my son!
NEO. I mark it well.
MER. Thou shalt be answerable.
NEO. Content: but speak.
MER. Then hear me. These two men whom I have named,
Diomedes and Odysseus, are set forth
Engaged on oath to bring this man by force
If reasons fail. The Achaeans every one
Have heard this plainly from Odysseus' mouth.
He was the louder and more confident.
NEO. Say, for what cause, after so long a time,
Can Atreus' sons have turned their thoughts on him,
Whom long they had cast forth? What passing touch
Of conscience moved them, or what stroke from Heaven,
Whose wrath requites all wicked deeds of men?
MER. Methinks thou hast not heard what I will now
Unfold to thee. There was a princely seer,
A son of Priam, Helenus by name,
Whom he for whom no word is bad enough,
Crafty Odysseus, sallying forth alone
One night, had taken, and in bonds displayed
'Fore all the Achaeans, a right noble prey.
He, 'mid his other prophecies, foretold
No Grecian force should sack Troy's citadel,
Till with fair reasons they had brought this man
From Lemnos isle, his lonely dwelling-place.
When thus the prophet spake, Laërtes' son
Straight undertook to fetch this man, and show him
To all the camp: -- he hoped, with fair consent:
But else, perforce. -- And, if he failed in this,
Whoever would might smite him on the head.
My tale is told, dear youth. I counsel speed
To thee and to the friend for whom thou carest.
PHI. Ah me, unhappy! has that rascal knave
Sworn to fetch me with reasons to their camp?
As likely might his reasons bring me back,
Like his begetter, from the house of death.
MER. You talk of what I know not. I will go
Shipward. May God be with you for all good. [Exit]
PHI. Is not this terrible, Laërtes' son
Should ever think to bring me with soft words
And show me from his deck to all their host?
No! Sooner will I listen to the tongue
Of the curs'd basilisk that thus hath maim'd me.
Ay, but he'll venture anything in word
Or deed. And now I know he will be here. http://louis8j8sheehan8.blogspot.com/
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Come, O my son, let us be gone, while seas
And winds divide us from Odysseus' ship.
Let us depart. Sure timely haste brings rest
And quiet slumber when the toil is done.
NEO. Shall we not sail when this south-western wind
Hath fallen, that now is adverse to our course?
PHI. All winds are fair to him who flies from woe.
NEO. Nay, but this head-wind hinders them no less.
PHI. No head-wind hinders pirates on their way,
When violence and rapine lead them on.
NEO. Well, then, let us be going, if you will;
When you have taken from within the cave
What most you need and value.
PHI. Though my all
Be little, there is that I may not lose.
NEO. What can there be that we have not on board?
PHI. A leaf I have found, wherewith I still the rage
Of my sore plague, and lull it quite to rest.
NEO. Well, bring it forth. -- What? Is there something more?
PHI. If any of these arrows here are fallen,
I would not leave them for a casual prey.
NEO. How? Do I see thee with the marvellous bow?
PHI. Here in my hand. The world hath only one.
NEO. And may one touch and handle it, and gaze
With reverence, as on a thing from Heaven?
PHI. Thou mayest, my son. This and whate'er of mine
May stead thee, 'tis thy privilege to enjoy.
NEO. In very truth I long for it, but so,
That longing waits on leave. Am I permitted?
PHI. Thou art, my son, -- and well thou speakest, -- thou art.
Thou, that hast given me light and life, the joy
Of seeing Mount Oeta and my father's home,
With all I love there, and his aged head, --
Thou that hast raised me far above my foes
Who triumphed! Thou may'st take it in thine hand,
And, -- when thou hast given it back to me, -- may'st vaunt
Alone of mortals for thine excellence
To have held this in thy touch. I, too, at first,
Received it as a boon for kindness done.
NEO. Well, go within.
PHI. Nay, I must take thee too.
My sickness craves thee for its comforter.
[Philoctetes & Neoptolemus go into
the cave]
CHORUS.
In fable I have heard,
Though sight hath ne'er confirmed the word,
How he who attempted once the couch supreme,
To a whirling wheel by Zeus the all-ruler bound,
Tied head and heel, careering ever round,
Atones his impious unsubstantial dream.
Of no man else, through eye or ear,
Have I discerned a fate more full of fear
Than yonder sufferer's of the cureless wound:
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Who did no violence, defrauded none: --
A just man, had he dwelt among the just
Unworthily behold him thrust
Alone to hear the billows roar
That break around a rugged shore!
How could he live, whose life was thus consumed with moan?
Where neighbour there was none:
No arm to stay him wandering lone,
Unevenly, with stumbling steps and sore;
No friend in need, no kind inhabitant,
To minister to his importunate want,
No heart whereto his pangs he might deplore.
None who, whene'er the gory flow
Was rushing hot, might healing herbs bestow,
Or cull from teeming Earth some genial plant
To allay the anguish of malignant pain
And soothe the sharpness of his poignant woe.
Like infant whom the nurse lets go,
With tottering movement here and there,
He crawled for comfort, whensoe'er
His soul-devouring plague relaxed its cruel strain.
Not fed with foison of all-teeming Earth
Whence we sustain us, ever-toiling men,
But only now and then
With wingèd things, by his wing'd shafts brought low,
He stayed his hunger from his bow.
Poor soul, that never through ten years of dearth
Had pleasure from the fruitage of the vine,
But seeking to some standing pool,
Nor clear nor cool,
Foul water heaved to head for lack of heartening wine.
But now, consorted with the hero's child,
He winneth greatness and a joyful change;
Over the water wild
Borne by a friendly bark beneath the range
Of Oeta, where Spercheius fills
Wide channels winding among lovely hills
Haunted of Melian nymphs, till he espies
The roof-tree of his father's hall,
And high o'er all
Shines the bronze shield of him, whose home is in the skies[6].
[Neoptolemus comes out of the cave, followed
by Philoctetes in pain]
NEO. Prithee, come on! Why dost thou stand aghast,
Voiceless, and thus astonied in thine air?
PHI. Oh! oh!
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NEO. What?
PHI. Nothing. Come my son, fear nought.
NEO. Is pain upon thee? Hath thy trouble come?
PHI. No pain, no pain! 'Tis past; I am easy now.
Ye heavenly powers!
NEO. Why dost thou groan aloud,
And cry to Heaven?
PHI. To come and save. Kind Heaven!
Oh, oh!
NEO. What is 't? Why silent? Wilt not speak?
I see thy misery.
PHI. Oh! I am lost, my son!
I cannot hide it from you. Oh! it shoots,
It pierces. Oh unhappy! Oh! my woe!
I am lost, my son, I am devoured. Oh me!
Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Pain! pain! Oh pain! oh pain!
Child, if a sword be to thine hand, smite hard,
Shear off my foot! heed not my life! Quick, come!
NEO. What hath so suddenly arisen, that thus
Thou mak'st ado and groanest o'er thyself?
PHI. Thou knowest.
NEO. What know I?
PHI. O! thou knowest, my son!
NEO. I know not.
PHI. How? Not know? Ah me! Pain, pain!
NEO. Thy plague is a sore burden, heavy and sore.
PHI. Sore? 'Tis unutterable. Have pity on me!
NEO. What shall I do?
PHI. Do not in fear forsake me.
This wandering evil comes in force again,
Hungry as ere it fed.
NEO. O hapless one!
Thrice hapless in thy manifold distress!
What wilt thou? Shall I raise thee on mine arm?
PHI. Nay, but receiving from my hand the bow,
As late thou didst desire me, keep it safe
And guard it, till the fury of my pain
Pass over me and cease. For when 'tis spent,
Slumber will seize me, else it ne'er would end.
I must sleep undisturbed. But if meanwhile
They come, -- by Heaven I charge thee, in no wise,
Willingly nor perforce, let them have this!
Else thou wilt be the slayer of us both;
Of me thy suppliant, and of thyself.
NEO. Fear not my care. No hand shall hold these arms
But thine and mine. Give, and Heaven bless the deed!
PHI. I give them; there, my son! But look to Heaven
And pray no envy smite thee, nor such bane
In having them, as fell on me and him
Who bore them formerly.
NEO. O grant it, Gods!
And grant us fair and happy voyage, where'er
Our course is shaped and righteous Heaven shall guide.
PHI. Ah! but I fear, my son, thy prayer is vain:
For welling yet again from depths within,
This gory ooze is dripping. It will come!
I know it will. O, foot, torn helpless thing,
What wilt thou do to me? Ah! ah! It comes,
It is at hand. 'Tis here! Woe's me, undone!
I have shown you all. Stay near me. Go not far:
Ah! ah!
O island king, I would this agony
Might cleave thy bosom through and through! Woe, woe!
Woe! Ah! ye two commanders of the host,
Agamemnon, Menelaüs, O that ye,
Another ten years' durance in my room
Might nurse this malady! O Death, Death, Death!
I call thee daily -- wilt thou never come?
Will it not be? -- My son, thou noble boy,
If thou art noble, take and burn me there
Aloft in yon all-worshipped Lemnian fire!
Yea, when the bow thou keep'st was my reward,
I did like service for the child of Heaven.
How now, my son?
What say'st? Art silent? Where -- where art thou, boy?
NEO. My heart is full, and groaning o'er thy woes.
PHI. Nay, yet have comfort. This affliction oft
Goes no less swiftly than it came. I pray thee,
Stand fast and leave me not alone!
NEO. Fear nought.
We will not stir.
PHI. Wilt thou remain?
NEO. Be sure of it.
PHI. I'll not degrade thee with an oath, my son.
NEO. Rest satisfied. I may not go without thee.
PHI. Thy hand, to pledge me that!
NEO. There, I will stay.
PHI. Now, now, aloft!
NEO. Where mean'st thou?
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PHI. Yonder aloft!
NEO. Whither? Thou rav'st. Why starest thou at the sky?
PHI. Now, let me go.
NEO. Where?
PHI. Let me go, I say!
NEO. I will not.
PHI. You will kill me. Let me go!
NEO. Well, thou know'st best I hold thee not.
PHI. O Earth,
I die. receive me to thy breast! This pain
Subdues me utterly, I cannot stand.
NEO. Methinks he will be fast in slumber soon
That head sinks backward, and a clammy sweat
Bathes all his limbs, while from his foot hath burst
A vein, dark bleeding. Let us leave him, friends,
In quietness, till he hath fallen to sleep.
CHORUS
Lord of the happiest life,
Sleep, thou that know'st not strife,
That know'st not grief,
Still wafting sure relief,
Come, saviour now!
Thy healing balm is spread
Over this pain worn head,
Quench not the beam that gives calm to his brow.
Look, O my lord, to thy path,
Either to go or to stay
How is my thought to proceed?
What is our cause for delay?
Look! Opportunity's power,
Fitting the task to the hour,
Giveth the race to the swift.
NEO. He hears not. But I see that to have ta'en
His bow without him were a bootless gain
He must sail with us. So the god hath said
Heaven hath decreed this garland for his head:
And to have failed with falsehood were a meed
Of shameful soilure for a shameless deed.
CH. God shall determine the end --
But for thine answer, friend,
Waft soft words low!
All sick men's sleep, we know,
Hath open eye;
Their quickly ruffling mind
Quivers in lightest wind,
Sleepless in slumber new danger to spy.
Think, O my lord, of thy path,
Secretly look forth afar,
What wilt thou do for thy need?
How with the wise wilt thou care?
If toward the nameless thy heart
Chooseth this merciful part,
Huge are the dangers that drift.
The wind is fair, my son, the wind is fair,
The man is dark and helpless, stretched in night.
(O kind, warm sleep that calmest human care!)
Powerless of hand and foot and ear and sight,
Blind, as one lying in the house of death.
(Think well if here thou utterest timely breath.)
This, O my son, is all my thought can find,
Best are the toils that without frightening bind.
NEO. Hush! One word more were madness. He revives.
His eye hath motion. He uplifts his head.
PHI. Fair daylight following sleep, and ye, dear friends,
Faithful beyond all hope in tending me!
I never could have dreamed that thou, dear youth,
Couldst thus have borne my sufferings and stood near
So full of pity to relieve my pain.
Not so the worthy generals of the host; --
This princely patience was not theirs to show.
Only thy noble nature, nobly sprung,
Made light of all the trouble, though oppressed
With fetid odours and unceasing cries.
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And now, since this my plague would seem to yield
Some pause and brief forgetfulness of pain,
With thine own hand, my son, upraise me here,
And set me on my feet, that, when my strength
After exhaustion shall return again,
We may move shoreward and launch forth with speed.
NEO. I feel unhoped-for gladness when I see
Thy painless gaze, and hear thy living breath,
For thine appearance and surroundings both
Were deathlike. But arise! Or, if thou wilt,
These men shall raise thee. For they will not shrink
From toil which thou and I at once enjoin.
PHI. Right, right, my son! But lift me thine own self,
As I am sure thou meanest. Let these be,
Lest they be burdened with the noisome smell
Before the time. Enough for them to bear
The trouble on board.
NEO. I will; stand up, endure!
PHI. Fear not. Old habit will enable me.
NEO. O me!
What shall I do? Now 'tis my turn to exclaim!
PHI. What canst thou mean? What change is here, my son?
NEO. I know not how to shift the troublous word.
'Tis hopeless.
PHI. What is hopeless? Speak not so,
Dear child!
NEO. But so my wretched lot hath fallen.
PHI. Ah! Can it be, the offence of my disease
Hath moved thee not to take me now on board?
NEO. All is offence to one who hath forced himself
From the true bent to an unbecoming deed.
PHI. Nought misbecoming to thyself or sire
Doest thou or speak'st, befriending a good man.
NEO. My baseness will appear. That wrings my soul.
PHI. Not in thy deeds. But for thy words, I fear me!
NEO. O Heaven! Must double vileness then be mine
Both shameful silence and most shameful speech?
PHI. Or my discernment is at fault, or thou
Mean'st to betray me and make voyage without me.
NEO. Nay, not without thee, there is my distress!
Lest I convey thee to thy bitter grief.
PHI. How? How, dear youth? I do not understand.
NEO. Here I unveil it. Thou art to sail to Troy,
To join the chieftains and the Achaean host.
PHI. What do I hear? Ah!
NEO. Grieve not till you learn.
PHI. Learn what? What wilt thou make of me? What mean'st thou?
NEO. First to release thee from this plague, and then
With thee to go and take the realm of Troy.
PHI. And is this thine intent?
NEO. 'Tis so ordained
Unchangeably. Be not dismayed! 'Tis so.
PHI. Me miserable! I am betrayed, undone!
What guile is here? My bow! give back my bow!
NEO. I may not. Interest, and duty too,
Force me to obey commandment.
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PHI. O thou fire,
Thou terror of the world! Dark instrument
Of ever-hateful guile! -- What hast thou done?
How thou hast cheated me! Art not ashamed
To look on him that sued to thee for shelter?
O heart of stone, thou hast stolen my life away
With yonder bow! -- Ah, yet I beg of thee,
Give it me back, my son, I entreat thee, give!
By all thy father worshipped, rob me not
Of life! -- Ah me! Now he will speak no more,
But turns away, obdúrate to retain it.
O ye, my comrades in this wilderness,
Rude creatures of the rocks, O promontories,
Creeks, precipices of the hills, to you
And your familiar presence I complain
Of this foul trespass of Achilles' son.
Sworn to convey me home, to Troy he bears me.
And under pledge of his right hand hath ta'en
And holds from me perforce my wondrous bow,
The sacred gift of Zeus-born Heracles,
Thinking to wave it midst the Achaean host
Triumphantly for his. In conquering me
He vaunts as of some valorous feat, and knows not
He is spoiling a mere corse, an empty dream,
The shadow of a vapour. In my strength
He ne'er had vanquished me. Even as I am,
He could not, but by guile. Now, all forlorn,
I am abused, deceived. What must I do?
Nay, give it me. Nay, yet be thy true self!
Thou art silent. I am lost. O misery!
Rude face of rock, back I return to thee
And thy twin gateway, robbed of arms and food,
To wither in thy cave companionless: --
No more with these mine arrows to destroy
Or flying bird or mountain-roving beast.
But, all unhappy! I myself must be
The feast of those on whom I fed, the chase
Of that I hunted, and shall dearly pay
In bloody quittance for their death, through one
Who seemed all ignorant of sinful guile.
Perish, -- not till I am certain if thy heart
Will change once more, -- if not, my curse on thee!
CH. What shall we do, my lord? We wait thy word
Or to sail now, or yield to his desire.
NEO. My heart is pressed with a strange pity for him,
Not now beginning, but long since begun.
PHI. Ay, pity me, my son! by all above,
Make not thy name a scorn by wronging me!
NEO. O! I am troubled sore. What must I do?
Would I had never left mine island home!
PHI. Thou art not base, but seemest to have learnt
Some baseness from base men. Now, as 'tis meet,
Be better guided -- leave me mine arms, and go.
NEO. (to Chorus).
What shall we do?
Enter Odysseus.
ODYSSEUS. What art thou doing, knave?
Give me that bow, and haste thee back again.
PHI. Alas! What do I hear? Odysseus' voice?
OD. Be sure of that, Odysseus, whom thou seest.
PHI. Oh, I am bought and sold, undone! 'Twas he
That kidnapped me, and robbed me of my bow.
OD. Yea. I deny it not. Be sure, 'twas I.
PHI. Give back, my son, the bow; release it!
OD. That,
Though he desire it, he shall never do.
Thou too shalt march along, or these shall force thee.
PHI. They force me! O thou boldest of bad men!
They force me?
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OD. If thou com'st not willingly.
PHI. O Lemnian earth and thou almighty flame,
Hephaestos' workmanship, shall this be borne,
That he by force must drag me from your care?
OD. 'Tis Zeus, I tell thee, monarch of this isle,
Who thus hath willed. I am his minister.
PHI. Wretch, what vile words thy wit hath power to say!
The gods are liars when invoked by thee.
OD. Nay, 'tis their truth compels thee to this voyage.
PHI. I will not have it so.
OD. I will. Thou shalt.
PHI. Woe for my wretchedness! My father, then,
Begat no freeman, but a slave in me.
OD. Nay, but the peer of noblest men, with whom
Thou art to take and ravage Troy with might.
PHI. Never, -- though I must suffer direst woe, --
While this steep Lemnian ground is mine to tread!
OD. What now is thine intent?
PHI. Down from the crag
This head shall plunge and stain the crag beneath.
OD. (to the Attendants.)
Ay, seize and bind him. Baffle him in this.
PHI. Poor hands, for lack of your beloved string,
Caught by this craven! O corrupted soul!
How thou hast undermined me, having taken
To screen thy quest this youth to me unknown,
Far worthier of my friendship than of thine,
Who knew no better than to obey command.
Even now 'tis manifest he burns within
With pain for his own error and my wrong.
But, though unwilling and mapt for ill,
Thy crafty, mean, and cranny spying soul
Too well hath lessoned him in sinful lore.
Now thou hast bound me, O thou wretch, and thinkest
To take me from this coast, where thou didst cast me
Outlawed and desolate, a corpse 'mongst men.
Oh!
I curse thee now, as ofttimes in the past:
But since Heaven yields me nought but bitterness,
Thou livest and art blithe, while 'tis my pain
To live on in my misery, laughed to scorn
By thee and Atreus' sons, those generals twain
Whom thou art serving in this chase. But thou
With strong compulsion and deceit was driven
Troyward, whilst I, poor victim, of free will
Took my seven ships and sailed there, yet was thrown
Far from all honour, -- as thou sayest, by them,
But, as they turn the tale, by thee. -- And now
Why fetch me hence and take me? To what end?
I am nothing, dead to you this many a year.
How, O thou Heaven-abhorred! am I not now
Lame and of evil smell? how shall ye vaunt
Before the gods drink-offering or the fat
Of victims, if I sail among your crew?
For this, as ye professed, was the chief cause
Why ye disowned me. Perish! -- So ye shall,
For the wrong done me, if the Heavens be just.
And that they are, I know. Else had ye ne'er
Sailed on this errand for an outcast wretch,
Had they not pricked your heart with thoughts of me.
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Oh, if ye pity me, chastising powers,
And thou, the Genius of my land, revenge,
Revenge this crime on all their heads at once!
My life is pitiable; but if I saw
Their ruin, I would think me well and strong.
CH. How full of bitterness is his resolve,
Wrathfully spoken with unbending will!
OD. I might speak long in answer, did the time
Give scope, but now one thing is mine to say.
I am known to vary with the varying need;
And when 'tis tried, who can be just and good,
My peer will not be found for piety.
But though on all occasions covetous
Of victory, this once I yield to thee,
And willingly. Unhand him there. Let go!
Leave him to stay. What further use of thee,
When we have ta'en these arms? Have we not Teucer,
Skilled in this mystery? Yea, I may boast
Myself thine equal both in strength and aim
To wield them. Fare thee well, then! Thou art free
To roam thy barren isle. We need thee not.
Let us be going! And perchance thy gift
May bring thy destined glory to my brow.
PHI. What shall I do? Alas, shalt thou be seen
Graced with mine arms amongst Achaean men?
OD. No more! I am going.
PHI. O Achilles' child!
Wilt thou, too, vanish? Must I lose thy voice?
OD. Come on, and look not, noble though thou be,
Lest thou undo our fortune.
PHI. Mariners,
Must ye, too, leave me thus disconsolate?
Will ye not pity me?
CH. Our captain's here.
Whate'er he saith to thee, that we too speak.
NEO. My chief will call me weakling, soft of heart;
But go not yet, since our friend bids you stay.
Till we have prayed, and all be ready on board.
Meanwhile, perchance, he may conceive some thought
That favours our design. We two will start;
And ye, be swift to speed forth at our call. [Exit]
MONODY.
PHI. O cavern of the hollow rock,
Frosty and stifling in the seasons' change!
How I seem fated never more to range
From thy sad covert, that hath felt the shock
Of pain on pain, steeped with my wretchedness.
Now thou wilt be my comforter in death!
Grief haunted harbour, choked with my distress!
Tell me, what hope is mine of daily food,
Who will be careful for my good?
I fail. Ye cowering creatures of the sky,
Oh, as ye fly,
Snatch me, borne upward on the blast's sharp breath!
CH. 1. Thou child of misery!
No mightier power hath this decreed,
But thine own will and deed
Hath bound thee thus in grief,
Since, when kind Heaven had sent relief
And shown the path of wisdom firm and sure,
Thou still hast chosen this evil to endure.
PHI. O hapless life, sore bruised with pain!
No more with living mortal may I dwell,
But ever pining in this desert cell
With lonely grief, all famished must remain
And perish; for what food is mine to share,
When this strong arm no longer wields my bow,
Whose fleet shafts flew to smite the birds of air
I was o'erthrown by words, words dark and blind,
Low-creeping from a traitorous mind!
O might I see him, whose unrighteous thought
This ruin wrought,
Plagued for no less a period with like woe!
CH. 2. Not by our craft thou art caught,
But Destiny divine hath wrought
The net that holds thee bound.
Aim not at us the sound
Of thy dread curse with dire disaster fraught.
On others let that light! 'Tis our true care
Thou should'st not scorn our love in thy despair.
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PHI. Now, seated by the shore
Of heaving ocean hoar,
He mocks me, waving high
The sole support of my precarious being,
The bow which none e'er held but I.
O treasure of my heart, torn from this hand,
That loved thy touch, -- if thou canst understand,
How sad must be thy look in seeing
Thy master destined now no more,
Like Heracles of yore,
To wield thee with an archer's might!
But in the grasp of an all-scheming wight,
O bitter change! thou art plied;
And swaying ever by his side,
Shalt view his life of dark malignity,
Teeming with guileful shames, like those he wrought on me.
CH. 3. Nobly to speak for the right
Is manly and strong;
But not with an envious blight
To envenom the tongue;
He to serve all his friends of the fleet,
One obeying a many-voiced word,
Through the minist'ring craft of our lord
Hath but done what was meet.
PHI. Come, legions of the wild,
Of aspect fierce or mild,
Fowl from the fields of air,
And beasts that roam with bright untroubled gaze,
No longer bounding from my lair
Fly mine approach! Now freely without fear
Ye may surround my covert and come near,
Treading the savage rock-strewn ways.
The might I had is no more mine,
Stolen with those arms divine.
This fort hath no man to defend.
Come satisfy your vengeful jaws, and rend
These quivering tainted limbs!
Already hovering death bedims
My fainting sense. Who thus can live on air,
Tasting no gift of earth that breathing mortals share?
CH. 4. Ah! do not shrink from thy friend,
If love thou reverest,
But know 'tis for thee to forfend
The fate which thou fearest.
The lot thou hast here to deplore,
Is sad evermore to maintain,
And hardship in sickness is sore,
But sorest in pain.
PHI. Kindest of all that e'er before
Have trod this shore,
Again thou mind'st me of mine ancient woe!
Why wilt thou ruin me? What wouldst thou do?
CH. 5. How mean'st thou?
PHI. If to Troy, of me abhorred
Thou e'er hast hoped to lead me with thy lord.
CH. 6. So I judge best.
PHI. Begone at once, begone!
CH. 7. Sweet is that word, and swiftly shall be done!
Let us be gone, each to his place on board.
[The Chorus make as if they were going]
PHI. Nay, by dear Zeus, to whom all suppliants moan
Leave me not yet!
CH. 8. Keep measure in thy word.
PHI. Stay, by Heaven, stay!
CH. 9. What wilt thou say?
PHI. O misery! O cruel power
That rul'st this hour!
I am destroyed. Ah me!
O poor torn limb, what shall I do with thee
Through all my days to be?
Ah, strangers, come, return, return!
CH. 10. What new command are we to learn
Crossing thy former mind?
PHI. Ah! yet be kind.
Reprove not him, whose tongue, with grief distraught,
Obeys not, in dark storms, the helm of thought!
CH. 11. Come, poor friend, the way we call.
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PHI. Never, learn it once for all!
Not though he, whom Heaven obeys,
Blast me with fierce lightning's blaze!
Perish Troy, and all your host,
That have chosen, to their cost,
To despise and cast me forth,
Since my wound obscured my worth!
Ah, but, strangers, if your sense
Hath o'er-mastered this offence,
Yield but one thing to my prayer!
CH. 12. What wouldst thou have?
PHI. Some weapon bare,
Axe or sword or sharpened dart,
Bring it to content my heart.
CH. 13. What is thy new intent?
PHI. To sever point by point
This body, joint from joint.
On bloody death my mind is bent.
CH. 14. Wherefore?
PHI. To see my father's face.
CH. 15. Where upon earth?
PHI. He hath no place
Where sun doth shine, but in the halls of night.
O native country, land of my delight,
Would I were blest one moment with thy sight!
Why did I leave thy sacred dew
And loose my vessels from thy shore,
To join the hateful Danaän crew
And lend them succour? Oh, I am no more!
LEADER OF CH.
Long since thou hadst seen me nearing yonder ship,
Had I not spied Odysseus and the son
Of great Achilles hastening to our side.
OD. Wilt thou not tell me why thou art hurrying
This backward journey with reverted speed?
NEO. To undo what I have wrongly done to-day.
OD. Thy words appal me. What is wrongly done?
NEO. When in obeying thee and all the host --
OD. Thou didst what deed that misbecame thy life?
NEO. I conquered with base stratagem and fraud --
OD. Whom? What new plan is rising in thy mind?
NEO. Not new. But to the child of Poeas here --
OD. What wilt thou do? I quake with strange alarm.
NEO. From whom I took these weapons, back again -- --
OD. O Heaven! thou wilt not give them! Mean'st thou this?
NEO. Yea, for I have them through base sinful means.
OD. I pray thee, speak'st thou thus to anger me?
NEO. If the truth anger thee, the truth is said.
OD. Achilles' son! What word is fallen from thee?
NEO. Must the same syllables be thrice thrown forth?
OD. Once was too much. Would they had ne'er been said!
NEO. Enough. Thou hast heard my purpose clearly told.
OD. I know what power shall thwart thee in the deed.
NEO. Whose will shall hinder me?
OD. The Achaean host
And I among them.
NEO. Thou'rt sharp-witted, sure!
But little wit or wisdom show'st thou here.
OD. Neither thy words nor thy design is wise.
NEO. But if 'tis righteous, that is better far.
OD. How righteous, to release what thou hast ta'en
By my device?
NEO. I sinned a shameful sin,
And I will do mine utmost to retrieve it.
OD. How? Fear'st thou not the Achaeans in this act?
NEO. In doing right I fear not them nor thee.
OD. I call thy power in question.
NEO. Then I'll fight,
Not with Troy's legions, but with thee.
OD. Come on!
Let fortune arbitrate.
NEO. Thou seest my hand
Feeling the hilt.
OD. And me thou soon shalt see
Doing the like and dallying not! -- And yet
I will not touch thee, but will go and tell
The army, that shall wreak this on thy head. [Exit]
NEO. Thou show'st discretion: which if thou preserve,
Thou may'st maintain a path exempt from pain.
Ho! son of Poeas, Philoctetes, come
And leave thy habitation in the rock.
PHI. What noise again is troubling my poor cave?
Why do ye summon me? What crave ye, sirs?
Ha! 'tis some knavery. Are ye come to add
Some monster evil to my mountainous woe?
NEO. Fear not, but hearken to what now I speak.
PHI. I needs must fear thee, whose fair words erewhile
Brought me to bitter fortune.
NEO. May not men
Repent and change?
PHI. Such wast thou in thy talk,
When thou didst rob me of my bow, -- so bright
Without, so black within.
NEO. Ah, but not now,
Assure thee! Only let me hear thy will,
Is 't constant to remain here and endure,
Or to make voyage with us?
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PHI. Stop, speak no more!
Idle and vain will all thine utterance be.
NEO. Thou art so resolved?
PHI. More firmly than I say.
NEO. I would I might have brought thee to my mind,
But since my words are out of tune, I have done.
PHI. Thou wert best. No word of thine can touch my soul
Or win me to thy love, who by deceit
Hast reft my life away. And then thou com'st
To school me, -- of noblest father, basest son!
Perish, the Atridae first of all, and then
Laërtes' child, and thou!
NEO. Curse me no more,
But take this hallowed weapon from my hand.
PHI. What words are these? Am I again deceived?
NEO. No, by the holiest name of Zeus on high!
PHI. O voice of gladness, if thy speech be true!
NEO. The deed shall prove it. Only reach thy hand,
And be again sole master of thy bow. [Odysseus appears]
OD. But I make protest, in the sight of Heaven,
For Atreus' sons, and all the Achaean host.
PHI. Dear son, whose voice disturbs us? Do I hear
Odysseus?
OD. Ay, and thou behold'st him nigh,
And he shall force thee to the Trojan plain,
Howe'er Achilles' offspring make or mar.
PHI. This shaft shall bear thee sorrow for that boast.
NEO. Let it not fly, by Heaven!
PHI. Dear child, let go
Mine arm!
NEO. I will not. [Exit Odysseus]
PHI. Ah! Why hast thou robbed
My bow of bringing down mine enemy?
NEO. This were ignoble both for thee and me.
PHI. One thing is manifest, the first o' the host
Lying forerunners of the Achaean band,
Are brave with words, but cowards with the steel.
NEO. Well, now the bow is thine. Thou hast no cause
For blame or anger any more 'gainst me.
PHI. None. Thou hast proved thy birthright, dearest boy.
Not from the loins of Sisyphus thou earnest,
But from Achilles, who in life was held
Noblest of men alive, and now o' the dead.
NEO. It gladdens me that thou shouldst speak in praise
Both of my sire and me. But hear me tell
The boon for which I sue thee. -- Mortal men
Must bear such evils as high Heaven ordains;
But those afflicted by self-chosen ills,
Like thine to-day, receive not from just men
Or kind indulgence or compassionate thought.
And thou art restive grown, and wilt not hearken,
But though one counsel thee with kind'st intent,
Wilt take him for a dark malignant foe.
Yet, calling Zeus to witness for my soul,
Once more I will speak. Know this, and mark it well:
Thou bear'st this sickness by a heavenly doom,
Through coming near to Chrysa's sentinel,
The lurking snake, that guards the sky-roofed fold[7].
And from this plague thou ne'er shall find reprieve
While the same Sun god rears him from the east
And droops to west again, till thou be come
Of thine own willing mind to Troia's plain,
Where our physicians, sons of Phoebus' child[8],
Shall soothe thee from thy sore, and thou with me
And with this bow shalt take Troy's citadel.
How do I know this? I will tell thee straight
We have a Trojan captive, Helenus,
Both prince and prophet, who hath clearly told
This must be so, yea, and ere harvest time
This year, great Troy must fall, else if his words
Be falsified, who will may slay the seer.
Now, since thou know'st of this, yield thy consent;
For glorious is the gain, being singled forth
From all the Greeks as noblest, first to come
To healing hands, and then to win renown
Unrivalled, vanquishing all tearful Troy.
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PHI. Oh how I hate my life! Why must it keep
This breathing form from sinking to the shades?
How can I prove a rebel to his mind
Who thus exhorts me with affectionate heart?
And yet, oh misery! must I give way?
Then how could I endure the light of heaven?
With whom could I exchange a word? Ay me!
Eyes that have seen each act of my sad life,
How could ye bear it, to behold the sons
Of Atreus, my destroyers, comrades now
And friends! Laërtes' wicked son, my friend!
And less I feel the grief of former wrong
Than shudder with expectance of fresh harm
They yet may work on me. For when the mind
Hath once been mother of an evil brood,
It nurses nought but evils. Yea, at thee
I marvel. Thou should'st ne'er return to Troy,
Nor suffer me to go, when thou remember'st
What insult they have done thee, ravishing
Thy father's rights from thee. And wilt thou then
Sail to befriend them, pressing me in aid?
Nay, do not, son; but, even as thou hast sworn,
Convey me home, and thou, in Scyros dwelling,
Leave to their evil doom those evil men.
So thou shalt win a twofold gratitude
From me and from my father, and not seem,
Helping vile men, to be as vile as they.
NEO. 'Tis fairly spoken. Yet I would that thou
Relying on my word and on Heaven's aid,
Would'st voyage forth from Lemnos with thy friend.
PHI. Mean'st thou to Troy, and to the hateful sons
Of Atreus, me, with this distressful limb?
NEO. Nay, but to those that will relieve the pain
Of thy torn foot and heal thee of thy plague.
PHI. Thy words are horrible. What mean'st thou, boy?
NEO. The act I deem the noblest for us both.
PHI. Wilt thou speak so? Where is thy fear of Heaven?
NEO. Why should I fear, when I see certain gain?
PHI. Gain for the sons of Atreus, or for me?
NEO. Methinks a friend should give thee friendly counsel.
PHI. Friendly, to hand me over to my foes?
NEO. Ah, be not hardened in thy misery!
PHI. I know thou wilt ruin me by what thou speakest.
NEO. Not I. The case is dark to thee, I see.
PHI. I know the Atreidae cast me on this rock.
NEO. But how, if they should save thee afterward?
PHI. They ne'er shall make me see Troy with my will.
NEO. Hard is my fortune, then, if by no sleight
Of reasoning I can draw thee to my mind.
For me, 'twere easiest to end speech, that thou
Might'st live on as thou livest in hopeless pain.
PHI. Then leave me to my fate! -- But thou hast touched
My right hand with thine own, and given consent
To bear me to my home. Do this, dear son!
And do not linger to take thought of Troy.
Enough that name hath echoed in my groans.
NEO. If thou wilt, let us be going.
PHI. Nobly hast thou said the word.
NEO. Lean thy steps on mine.
PHI. As firmly as my foot will strength afford.
NEO. Ah! but how shall I escape Achaean anger?
PHI. Do not care!
NEO. Ah! but should they spoil my country!
PHI. I to shield thee will be there.
NEO. How to shield me, how to aid me?
PHI. With the shafts of Heracles
I will scare them.
NEO. Give thy blessing to this isle, and come in peace.
HERACLES appears from above.
HERACLES. First, son of Poeas, wait till thou hast heard
The voice of Heracles, and weighed his word.
Him thou beholdest from the Heavenly seat
Come down, for thee leaving the blest retreat,
To tell thee all high Zeus intends, and stay
Thy purpose in the journey of to-day.
Then hear me, first how after my long toils
By strange adventure I have found and won
Immortal glory, which thine eyes perceive;
And the like lot, I tell thee, shall be thine,
After these pains to rise to glorious fame.
Sailing with this thy comrade to Troy-town,
First thou shalt heal thee from thy grievous sore,
And then, being singled forth from all the host
As noblest, thou shalt conquer with that bow
Paris, prime author of these years of harm,
And capture Troy, and bear back to thy hall
The choicest guerdon, for thy valour's meed,
To Oeta's vale and thine own father's home.
But every prize thou tak'st be sure thou bear
Unto my pyre, in memory of my bow.
This word, Achilles' offspring, is for thee
No less. For, as thou could'st not without him,
So, without thee, he cannot conquer Troy.
Then, like twin lions hunting the same hill,
Guard thou him, and he thee! and I will send
Asclepius Troyward to relieve thy pain.
For Ilion now a second time must fall
Before the Herculean bow. But, take good heed,
Midst all your spoil to hold the gods in awe.
For our great Father counteth piety
Far above all. This follows men in death,
And fails them not when they resign their breath.
PHI. Thou whom I have longed to see,
Thy dear voice is law to me.
NEO. I obey with gladdened heart.
HER. Lose no time: at once depart!
Bright occasion and fair wind
Urge your vessel from behind.
PHI. Come, let me bless the region ere I go.
Poor house, sad comrade of my watch, farewell!
Ye nymphs of meadows where soft waters flow
Thou ocean headland, pealing thy deep knell,
Where oft within my cavern as I lay
My hair was moist with dashing south-wind's spray,
And ofttimes came from Hermes' foreland high
Sad replication of my storm-vext cry;
Ye fountains and thou Lycian water sweet, --
I never thought to leave you, yet my feet
Are turning from your paths, -- we part for aye.
Farewell! and waft me kindly on my way,
O Lemnian earth enclosed by circling seas,
To sail, where mighty Fate my course decrees,
And friendly voices point me, and the will
Of that heroic power, who doth this act fulfil.
CH. Come now all in one strong band;
Then, ere loosing from the land,
Pray we to the nymphs of sea
Kind protectresses to be,
Till we touch the Trojan strand.
* * * * *
In the midst of surgery for a deviated septum, Catey Merriman's muscles began to go rigid and her temperature soared. As the surgical team realized she was reacting to the anesthesia, they halted the procedure, injected a powerful muscle relaxant and packed her body in ice. The Niskayuna, N.Y., teacher woke up in the hospital's critical-care unit and asked herself, "Did I die?"
Anesthetics can trigger malignant hyperthermia, a rare but deadly disorder, in susceptible patients.
Ms. Merriman didn't die, but she easily could have, had the medical team not acted quickly to reverse the onset of malignant hyperthermia, a rare but potentially deadly disorder. Malignant hyperthermia is caused by an inherited genetic mutation that triggers an uncontrolled rise of calcium levels in muscle cells when a patient inhales certain commonly used anesthetics. A patient's body temperature can jump to 108 degrees in minutes, followed by cardiac arrest and death.
The Malignant Hyperthermia Association of the United States, a nonprofit group started by patients, operates a 24-hour hot line to help medical professionals identify and treat malignant hyperthermia. The association fields about 650 calls a year, including one from the staff treating Ms. Merriman three years ago, according to anesthesiologist Henry Rosenberg, the group's president. http://www.myface.com/index.php?do=/public/account/submit/add-blog/added_3049/
Dr. Rosenberg, director of medical education at St. Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, N.J., says incidents are likely underreported, and he estimates that there are about 1,000 cases a year.
Malignant hyperthermia can occur in any health-care setting. But the recent death of teen Stephanie Kuleba in a Boca Raton, Fla., surgical center where she was undergoing elective breast surgery has put a spotlight on the many doctors' offices and surgical centers where a growing number of surgical procedures are performed. Anesthesia administered in a hospital setting is considered safe because of the round-the-clock presence of trained anesthesiology professionals. In offices and surgery centers, there may not always be an anesthesiologist or nurse anesthetist with graduate training who can recognize and respond to danger signs.
"As we've made anesthesia safer, one result is the attitude that it must be so easy even a caveman can do it," says Roger Moore, president-elect of the American Society of Anesthesiologists. "There are thousands of things that can go wrong that need the vigilance and training of an anesthesiology professional."
Patients undergoing procedures outside of hospitals may also face higher risk of complications from surgical infections, blood clots and blood-pressure problems that may require emergency transfers to hospitals. Studies show that the highest number of incidents occur with cosmetic-surgery patients, such as those undergoing liposuction in doctors' offices. http://louis2j2sheehan.bloggerteam.com/
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Several have died after excess fluids were pumped into surgical sites or when they had a bad reaction to overdoses of the local anesthetic lidocaine.
Currently, 24 states have regulations aimed at protecting patients undergoing medical procedures in an office setting, and more are considering such measures. A spokeswoman for the Ambulatory Surgery Center Association, which represents outpatient centers, says patients should talk with representatives of a surgery center to learn about the quality standards in place and any other licensing or certification criteria that might apply.
Researchers are still studying malignant hyperthermia, and there are no precise statistics on the number of episodes world-wide. But recent studies indicate that as many as 1 in 3,000 people may have the genetic mutation that predisposes them to a malignant-hyperthermia reaction under inhaled anesthesia. Since the disorder was first identified more than three decades ago, death rates have fallen to less than 5% from more than 80%, thanks largely to the introduction of dantrolene, the muscle relaxant that can quickly stop the uncontrolled release of calcium cells.
But while virtually all hospitals have an adequate supply of dantrolene on hand, medical safety experts say doctors' offices and surgical centers often don't. The reason often given by doctors and surgical centers is the cost of the drug, which has a three-year shelf life. But Dr. Rosenberg says that isn't a good excuse: The cost of an adequate supply to treat an episode is about $2,500, which is a relatively inexpensive insurance policy against disaster.
Keith Metz, a member of the board of the Ambulatory Surgery Center Association, says that if inhalation anesthetics are being used, the most important questions for patients to ask are whether the center has an attending anesthesiologist and an adequate supply of dantrolene on hand -- and whether staffers know how to use it. Dantrolene can require preparing and administering as many as 36 vials in quick sequence. Dr. Metz, an anesthesiologist at a surgical center in Southfield Hills, Mich., says he has seen a case of malignant hyperthermia only once in his career. Still, he says, "It's the same as saying we are unlikely to have a fire, but it's important to have a fire extinguisher around."
Because inhaled anesthetics that trigger malignant hyperthermia are cheap, effective and easy to use -- including on children -- they are the drugs of choice in many surgeries. Uses range from ear-tube insertions, wisdom-teeth removal and elective cosmetic surgery to even more complex procedures like open-heart surgery. Drugs that trigger malignant hyperthermia include potent inhalation agents like halothane, isoflurane and sevoflurane, and older drugs like ether. Susceptible patients should be sedated instead with intravenous drugs such as propofol, barbiturates and benzodiazapenes, and short-acting narcotics like fentanyl.
Arizona's state medical board earlier this year banned physicians in office-based surgery centers from using any drug that could trigger malignant hyperthermia.
The Malignant Hyperthermia Association urges patients who have ever had a family member experience complications during anesthesia to discuss their own risks before surgery. The group offers detailed information on risks, prevention and treatment on its Web site, mhaus.org.
Those with muscular dystrophy in the family may be at risk. Indeed, Ms. Merriman's father had had the disease, and she says she informed the hospital of this before her surgery. Researchers also are studying whether there is a relationship between malignant hyperthermia and sudden deaths in young athletes and soldiers linked to heat stroke. Dr. Rosenberg says susceptible patients may have no problem under anesthesia in one surgery but may still be at risk in a future procedure. And patients can have a reaction after surgery in the recovery room, so close monitoring is important.
The most accurate test to determine predisposition to malignant hyperthermia is a specialized muscle biopsy that analyzes the response of a piece of muscle taken from the thigh to a triggering anesthetic. But it is available in only a handful of centers and can cost more than $6,000. http://louisbjbsheehan.blogspot.com/
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A genetic test is available that can be performed on a blood sample, but its accuracy still needs to be improved, Dr. Rosenberg says. Those who do have the genetic disorder or may be at risk because of family history should wear medical-identification bracelets. Teens and young adults, and especially highly athletic men and women, tend to be more vulnerable, perhaps because of their stage of muscle development or hormone levels.
Tom Kuleba, whose daughter Stephanie, a high-school cheerleader, died last month, says he had never heard of malignant hyperthermia and knew of no family history of problems with anesthesia. The surgery was performed by a board-certified plastic surgeon with an anesthesiologist present, and though dantrolene was administered, among the questions raised is the adequacy of the dose. The death is still being investigated by the state medical board. The family has started a Web site, stephaniejudekuleba.org, to educate consumers about the risks of anesthesia, especially in outpatient surgical centers. "We need to raise awareness so no other parent has to suffer the horrific loss of a child," says Mr. Kuleba.
A Tambor-class submarine,
was the first ship of the United States Navy to be named for the lake herring.
Her keel was laid down by the Electric Boat Company in Groton, Connecticut. She was launched on 31 January 1941 sponsored by Mrs. Wilson Brown, wife of Rear Admiral Wilson Brown, Superintendent of the United States Naval Academy, and commissioned on 30 June 1941 with Lieutenant Willard A. Saunders in command.
Attached to the Atlantic Fleet Grayback conducted her shakedown cruise in Long Island Sound out of Newport, New London, and New York City. In company with Grampus (SS-207) she departed New London, Connecticut, on 8 September for patrol duty in the Caribbean Sea and Chesapeake Bay; then arrived Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on 30 November for overhaul. With the United States's entry into the war, Grayback sailed for Pearl Harbor on 8 February.
Grayback’s first war patrol from 15 February to 10 April took her along the coast of Saipan and Guam. There she participated in a deadly four-day game of hide-and-seek with an enemy submarine; the enemy I-boat fired two torpedoes at Grayback on the morning of 22 February, then continued to trail her across the Pacific. Grayback spotted the enemy conning tower a couple of times, and the Japanese ship broached once; but the Grayback could not get into position to attack. After four nerve-wracking days, Grayback shook the other sub and continued on patrol. First blood for her came on 17 March as she sank a 3291-ton cargo ship off Port Lloyd.
Grayback’s second war patrol met with a dearth of targets although she even took the unusual and risky measure of patrolling surfaced during the day. On 22 June she arrived at Fremantle, Australia, which was to remain her home base for most of the war. Her third and fourth war patrols, in the South China Sea and St. George's Passage were equally frustrating as Grayback was hampered by bright moonlight, shallow and treacherous water, and enemy patrol craft. Despite these hazards, she damaged several freighters and also got in a shot at another Japanese submarine. However, the very presence of Grayback and her sister ships in these waters—the threat they presented to shipping and the number of enemy escorts they tied up—was an important factor in the successful conclusion of the Guadalcanal campaign, America's first offensive campaign in the Pacific war.
The fifth war patrol began as Grayback sailed from Australia on 7 December 1942. Only a week out of port, Pharmacist's Mate Harry B. Roby was called upon to perform an emergency appendectomy, the second to be done on a patrolling submarine. With Grayback running silent and steady a hundred feet beneath the surface, the untutored Roby successfully removed the infected appendix, and his patient was back standing watch by the end of the patrol. Then 20 December, Grayback enjoyed "a Jap appetizer for Christmas dinner," as she battle surfaced to sink four landing barges with her deck guns. Four days later she was again fired on by an enemy submarine but maneuvered to avoid the torpedoes. On 3 January 1943 she gained her revenge by sending to the bottom I-18, one of the 25 Japanese submarines chalked up by the Pacific submarines.
On 5 January Grayback served as beacon ship for the bombardment of Munda Bay and also indulged in some hair-raising rescue work. Lying off Munda early in the morning of 5 January, she received word that six survivors of a crashed B-25 Mitchell bomber were holed up on the island. Grayback sent ashore two men, then submerged at dawn to avoid enemy aircraft. The submariners located the downed aviators, three of whom were injured, and hid out with them in the jungle. http://louiscjcsheehan.blogspot.com/
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As night fell, Grayback surfaced offshore and by coded light signals directed the small boat "home safe" with the rescued aviators. For this episode skipper Edward C. Stephan received the Navy Cross.
Grayback continued on patrol, torpedoing and damaging several Japanese ships. On 17 January she attacked a destroyer escorting a large maru, hoping to disable the escort and then sink the freighter with her deck guns. However, the destroyer evaded the torpedoes and dropped 19 depth charges on Grayback. One blew a gasket on a manhole cover, and the submarine, leaking seriously, was ordered back to Brisbane where she arrived 23 February.
On her sixth war patrol from 16 February to 4 April 1943, Grayback again had a run of bad luck and returned empty-handed from the Bismarck Islands-Solomon Islands area. Her newly installed SJ radar had failed to function; and although she had taken several shots at marus, none were sunk.
The seventh patrol was more successful. Departing Brisbane on 25 April, Grayback intercepted a convoy whose position had been radioed to her by Albacore (SS-218) on 11 May. In a night surface attack Grayback fired a spread of six torpedoes at the seven freighters and their three escorts. The three escorts charged and she had to go deep to elude the attacking enemy. She was credited with the sinking of cargo ship Yodogawa Maru. On 16 May she torpedoed and seriously damaged a destroyer. The following day Grayback intercepted four marus with one escort and sank freighter England Maru and damaged two others before she was forced to dive. She arrived Pearl Harbor on 30 May, then proceeded to San Francisco, California, for a much needed overhaul.
Arriving Pearl Harbor on 12 September 1943, Grayback prepared for her eighth war patrol. Sailing 26 September with Shad (SS-235), she rendezvoused with Cero (SS-225) at Midway Island to form the first of the Submarine Force's highly successful wolf packs. The three submarines under Captain "Swede" Momsen in Cero, cruised the China Sea and returned to base with claims of 38,000 tons sunk and 3300 damaged. Grayback accounted for two ships, a passenger-cargo vessel torpedoed 14 October and a former light cruiser, Awata Maru, torpedoed after an end-around run on a fast convoy 22 October. Wolf pack tactics came into play 2 October as Grayback closed a convoy already attacked by Shad and administered the coup de grace to a 9000-ton transport listing from two of Shad’s torpedoes. The submarines had now expended all torpedoes, and on 10 November they returned to Midway.
With almost a quarter of her crew untested in battle Grayback departed Pearl Harbor for the East China Sea on 2 December for her ninth war patrol. Within five days of her first contact with Japanese ships, she had expended all her torpedoes in a brilliant series of attacks which netted four ships for a total of over 10,000 tons. On the night of 18 December to 19 December Grayback wreaked havoc on a convoy of four freighters and three escorts. She sent freighter Gyokurei Maru and escort Numakaze to the bottom and damaged several others in surface attack. Two nights later, 20 December to 21 December, she spotted another convoy of six ships; and, after an end-around run she fired a spread of nine torpedoes into the heart of the Japanese formation. This first attack sunk one freighter and damaged another before Grayback dived to elude depth charges. Three hours later she surfaced and sank a second freighter. After an unsuccessful attack the following night had exhausted her torpedo supply, Grayback headed home. Undaunted by lack of torpedoes, the submarine battle surfaced 27 December and sank a good-sized fishing boat with deck guns before reaching Pearl Harbor on 4 January 1944.
Grayback’s tenth patrol, her most successful in terms of tonnage sunk, was also to be her last. She sailed from Pearl Harbor on 28 January 1944, for the East China Sea. On 24 February Grayback radioed that she had sunk two cargo ships 19 February and had damaged two others. http://louisijisheehan.blogspot.com/
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On 25 February she transmitted her second and final report. That morning she had sunk tanker Toshin Maru and severely damaged another. With only two torpedoes remaining, she was ordered home from patrol. Due to reach Midway on 7 March, Grayback did not arrive. On 30 March ComSubPac listed her as missing and presumed lost with all hands.
From captured Japanese records the submarine's last few days can be pieced together. Heading home through the East China Sea, on 27 February Grayback used her last two torpedoes to sink the freighter Ceylon Maru. That same day, a Japanese carrier-based plane spotted a submarine on the surface in the East China Sea and attacked. According to Japanese reports the submarine "exploded and sank immediately," but antisubmarine craft were called in to depth-charge the area, clearly marked by a trail of air bubbles, until at last a heavy oil slick swelled to the surface. Grayback had ended her last patrol, one which cost the enemy some 21,594 tons of shipping.
Grayback ranked 20th among all submarines in total tonnage sunk with 63,835 tons and 24th in number of ships sunk with 14. The submarine and crew had received two Navy Unit Commendations for their seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth war patrols.
Grayback received eight battle stars for World War II service.
USS Grayback (SS/SSG/APSS/LPSS-574), the lead ship of her class of submarine, was the second ship of the United States Navy to be named for the grayback, a small herring of great commercial importance in the Great Lakes.
Grayback (SSG-574), underway, circa 1960.
Grayback (SSG-574), underway, circa 1960.
Career USN Jack
Ordered: 10 March 1951
Laid down: 1 July 1954
Launched: 2 July 1957
Commissioned: 7 March 1958
Decommissioned: 16 June 1984
Fate: sunk as a target near Subic Bay on 13 April 1986
Stricken: 16 January 1984
General characteristics
Displacement: 1740 tons light, 2768 tons full
Length: 83.2 m (273 ft), later extended to 317 ft 7 in (97 m)
Beam: 27 ft 2 in (8.3 m)
Draft: 19 ft (5.8 m)
Propulsion:
Speed: 14 knot (26 km/h)
Range:
Complement: 87 officers and men
Armament: eight torpedo tubes, one Regulus launcher
Motto: De Profundis Futurus
Her keel was laid down on 1 July 1954 by the Mare Island Naval Shipyard of Vallejo, California. She was launched on 2 July 1957 sponsored by Mrs. John A. Moore, widow of the last skipper of the first Grayback, and commissioned at Mare Island on 7 March 1958 with Lieutenant Commander Hugh G. Nott in command. Grayback was initially designated as an attack submarine, but was converted to a Regulus guided missile submarine (SSG-574) in 1958.
The first of the Navy's guided missile submarines to carry the Regulus II sea-to surface missiles, Grayback conducted tests and shakedown along the West Coast. While operating out of Port Hueneme, California, in September 1958 she carried out the first successful launching of a Regulus II missile from a submarine, which pointed the way to a revolutionary advance in the power of navies to attack land bases. Departing San Diego, California, on 30 October, Grayback arrived at Pearl Harbor on 8 November for a month of exercises and maneuvers before returning to Mare Island for her "10,000 mile checkup."
On 9 February 1959, Grayback departed Mare Island to make Pearl Harbor her permanent home base, reaching Hawaii 7 March via Port Hueneme, California, Long Beach, California, and Mazatlan, Mexico. After a series of exercises there, she cruised to Dutch Harbor, Unmak Island, Sequam Island, and Kodiak, Alaska, for further missile exercises from 3 July to 31 July. This was followed by the first of her nine deterrent missile strike missions, from 21 September to 12 November. Grayback's first patrol terminated at Yokosuka, Japan, as did two others. She returned to Pearl Harbor 8 December.
On 22 February 1960, Grayback modified her missile launching system and simplified her complex electrical circuits. After this, she again took up deterrent missile strike missions. Over the next 21⁄2 years she completed seven missions for a total of nearly 18 months at sea, much of this time submerged. In addition to Yokosuka, both Adak, Alaska, and Pearl Harbor also served as termination points for these patrols. On her nine patrols she spent more than 20 months at sea and logged well over 130,000 miles (209,000 km) on deterrent missile strike missions.
That schedule took its toll. On 27 August 1963, while snorkeling to recharge batteries, Grayback was buffeted by particularly strong seas. http://louisjjjsheehan.blogspot.com/
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The buffeting caused the After Main Battery breaker to short, starting a fire in the berthing compartment. One seaman failed to evacuate the compartment and was overcome by smoke and fumes. Main propulsion was lost for a short time, but was restored, and Grayback was able return to Pearl Harbor under her own power. Repairs took two weeks.
As more and more Polaris missile submarines became operational, they assumed the deterrent functions previously assigned to Grayback and her sister ships. The Regulus missile program ended in 1964 and Grayback was withdrawn from active service. She decommissioned at Mare Island Naval Shipyard, California, on 25 May 1964.
A second conversion began at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard in November 1967. The conversion was originally estimated at US$15.2 million but grew to over US$30 million. She was re-classified from a guided missile submarine to an amphibious transport submarine with hull classification symbol LPSS on 30 August 1968. (The Naval Vessel Registry entry for Grayback shows that at one point she was classified as a "plain" transport submarine, an APSS. Crew memoirs indicated that they were never aware of it. Presumably, while this classification was "official," it may have lasted only days.) The conversion heightened her sail by ten feet, added two auxiliary tanks to the forward end of the engine room (increasing the length of the boat by 12 feet), and, most significantly, converted the missile chambers to carry 67 embarked troops and SEAL Swimmer Delivery Vehicles (SDVs), including a decompression chamber in the starboard hangar.
Grayback was decommissioned for the second time on 15 January 1984 at Subic Bay Naval Station in the Republic of the Philippines. After decommissioning, Grayback was sunk as a target on 13 April 1986 in the South China Sea.
Born Ludmila Babková, she studied acting at Prague Conservatory and got her first movie role in a Czech film at the age of 17. Her mother appeared in several theater plays and her younger sister, Zorka Janů, was also a movie actress. Lida Baarova's first love affair was with the film director Karel Lamač. She was renowned for her beauty, with Czech movie director, Otakar Vávra commenting that, "Her beauty likely infatuated every man she met." After being discovered by talent scouts for the German movie studios, Lídá Baarova left Prague for Berlin.
In Berlin she met Gustav Fröhlich, an actor in the German cinema, and starred in several films with him. In 1935, following her successful appearance in the German film Barcarole, she received several job offers from the Hollywood studios. She turned them down, but later regretted it and told her biographer, Josef Škvorecký:
Baarova and Gustav Fröhlich cheerfully speak with Goebbels during a party in 1936.
Baarova and Gustav Fröhlich cheerfully speak with Goebbels during a party in 1936.
"I could have been as famous as Marlene Dietrich."
After her engagement to Gustav Fröhlich, she and her fiancé moved to the Schwanenwerder peninsula on the outskirts of Berlin, where their house on the (later named) Karl-Marx-Straße 8 was close to the residence of Joseph Goebbels on Inselstraße 8. Joseph Goebbels was a minister in Chancellor Hitler's administration, with a decisive voice in German movie production. Lída Baarová met Joseph Goebbels while working for Ufa films. They started an affair that lasted for over a year and caused her breakup with Gustav Fröhlich.
After Goebbels' wife Magda learned about this affair, she complained to Adolf Hitler. Hitler, who himself was not immune to Baarová's beauty, was the godfather of Goebbels' children, and sympathetic towards Magda; he asked Goebbels to end the affair. Goebbels offered his resignation instead. He wanted to divorce his wife, marry Lída Baarová, and leave Germany with his Liduška, (Czech diminutive of Lída, connoting love), as he affectionatedly called her, for Japan. However, Hitler did not accept his resignation. On October 15, 1938, Joseph Goebbels attempted suicide.
Shortly afterwards, Lída Baarová received a call from the German police that she was a persona non grata and was given consilium abeundi to leave Germany. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire1.blogspot.com/
She went to Prague and, in 1941, to Italy, where she starred in such movies as Grazia (1943), La Fornarina (1944), Vivere ancora (1945), and others. After American troops occupied Italy, she returned to Prague, where she dated her old friend Hans Albers, another of Germany's movie idols. In April of 1945, Lída Baarová left Prague for Germany, to join Albers in his country house on the shores of Lake Starnberg. On the way, she was taken into custody by the American military police, imprisoned in Munich, and later extradited to Czechoslovakia.
In Czechoslovakia, Baarová faced a death sentence for her work with the Germans during the war, but she was able to prove that she worked in Germany before the war and received only a prison sentence. In prison, she was often visited by Jan Kopecký who, like many others, was infatuated with her. Kopecký was a close relative of a prominent politician in the post-war government of Czechoslovakia who arranged Lída's release from prison. Jan Kopecký and Lída Baarová were married in 1949 and formed an itinerant troupe playing marionettes before they escaped to Austria. From there, Kopecký immigrated to Argentina, leaving Lída behind to recuperate in the sanatorium of Dr. Lundwall.
In Austria, Lída attempted a comeback, but Anton Walbrook, who was persecuted during the war for his sexual orientation, withdrew from a film where he was cast with her. To escape the resulting negative media, she left for Argentina, where she lived in extreme poverty. She decided to return to Italy. Her husband stayed in Argentina and they were divorced in 1956. Back in Italy, she appeared in several films, including Fellini's I Vitelloni (1953), where she played the wife of a rich merchant. In 1958, she moved to Salzburg, where she performed in a theater. In 1970, she married Kurt Lundwall, a physician 20 years her senior. In the same year, Rainer Werner Fassbinder gave her a part in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.
In the 1990s Lída Baarová reappeared on the cultural scene of the Czech Republic. She published her autobiography and a movie, Lída Baarová's Bittersweet Memories, appeared in 1995 and won an award at the 1996 Art Film Festival in Trenčianske Teplice, Slovakia.
Lída Baarová's headstone at Prague's Strašnice cemetery.
Lída Baarová's headstone at Prague's Strašnice cemetery.
Lída Baarová suffered from Parkinson's disease and died in 2000 in Salzburg, while living alone on the estate she inherited after the death of her second husband, Dr. Lundwall. If she ever felt guilt about her past,and after all many women have had affairs with married men, she rigorously suppressed it. "There's no doubt that Goebbels was an interesting character," she observed in 1997, "a charming and intelligent man and a very good storyteller. You could guarantee that he would keep a party going with his little asides and jokes.
Her ashes were interred in Prague's Strašnice cemetery, where she rests with her parents and sister Zorka Janů.
Filmography
* Sladké hořkosti Lídy Baarové (Lída Baarová's Bittersweet Memories, 1995)
* The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1970)
* Il Cielo brucia (The Sky Burns, 1957)
* Retorno a la verdad (The Truth Will Set You Free, 1957)
* El Batallón de las sombras (The Forgotten Ones, 1957)
* Rapsodia de sangre (Ecstasy, 1957)
* Todos somos necesarios (We All Matter, 1956)
* Viaje de novios (Honeymoon, 1956)
* La Mestiza (The Mestiza, 1956)
* Miedo (The Fear, 1956)
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* Gli innocenti pagano (What Price Innocence? 1953)
* Pietà per chi cade (Compassion, 1953)
* I Vitelloni (The Loafers, 1953)
* La vendetta di una pazza (Revenge of a Crazy Girl, 1952)
* Carne inquieta (Restless, 1952)
* Gli amanti di Ravello (The Lovers of Ravello, 1950)
* La Bisarca (1950)
* Vivere ancora (Still Alive, 1944)
* L' Ippocampo (The Sea-Horse, 1944)
* Il Cappello da prete (Priest's Hat, 1944)
* Ti conosco, mascherina! (Masked Girl, Recognized!, 1943)
* Grazia (The Charming Beauty, 1943)
* Turbína (Turbine, 1941)
* Paličova dcera (Arsonist's Daughter, 1941)
* Za tichých nocí (In the Still of the Night, 1941)
* Dívka v modrém (Girl in Blue, 1940)
* Život je krásný (Life Is Beautiful, 1940)
* Artur a Leontýna (Arthur and Leontine, 1940)
* Ohnivé léto (Fiery Summer, 1939)
* Die Geliebte (Love of my Life, 1939)
* Männer müssen so sein (Men Are That Way, 1939)
* Maskovaná milenka (Masked Paramour, 1939)
* Liebeslegende (Love Story, 1938)
* Der Spieler - Roman eines Schwindlers (Gambler's Story, 1938)
* Die Fledermaus (The Bat, 1937)
* Die Kronzeugin (The Chief Witness, 1937)
* Panenství (Virginity, 1937)
* Lidé na kře (People on the Floating Ice, 1937)
* Patrioten (Patriots, 1937)
* Unter Ausschluss der Öffentlichkeit (Private Show, 1937)
* Komediantská princezna (Gypsy Princess, 1936)
* Švadlenka (The Seamstress, 1936)
* Die Stunde der Versuchung (The Hour of Temptation, 1936)
* Verräter (Traitor, 1936)
* Barcarole (Boatman's Song, 1935)
* Leutnant Bobby, der Teufelskerl, (Lieutenant Bobby, the Daredevil, 1935)
* Einer zuviel an Bord (The Fifth-Wheel, 1935)
* Grandhotel Nevada, (Grand Hotel Nevada, 1934)
* Dokud máš maminku (As Long as your Mother is Alive, 1934)
* Zlatá Kateřina (Golden Kate, 1934)
* Na růžích ustláno (Easy Life, 1934)
* Pán na roztrhání (A Popular Guy, 1934)
* Pokušení paní Antonie (Antonia's Temptation, 1934)
* Její lékař (The Physician, 1933)
* Sedmá velmoc (The Seventh Superpower, 1933)
* Okénko (The Window, 1933)
* Madla z cihelny (The Brickmaker's Daughter, 1933)
* Jsem děvče s čertem v těle (Funky Girl, 1933)
* Funebrák (The Undertaker, 1932)
* Malostranští mušketýři (Prague's Musketeers, 1932)
* Růžové kombiné (The Pink Slip, 1932)
* Šenkýřka u divoké krásky (Waitress at the Wild Beauty's Bar, 1932)
* Lelíček ve službách Sherlocka Holmese (Lelíček in Sherlock Holmes' Service, 1932)
* Zapadlí vlastenci (Forgotten Patriots, 1932)
* Kariéra Pavla Čamrdy (Pavel Čamrda's Career, 1931)
* Obraceni Ferdyše Pištory (Conversion of Fred Pištora, 1931)
Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence by Gary Lynch and Richard Granger (Palgrave Macmillan, $26.95)
“Sometimes I think my head is so big because it is so full of dreams,” says John Merrick in the play The Elephant Man. He might have been speaking for the Boskops, an almost forgotten group of early humans who lived in southern Africa between 30,000 and 10,000 years ago. http://louis2j1sheehan2esquire.blogspot.com/
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Judging from fossil remains, scientists say the Boskops were similar to modern humans but had small, childlike faces and huge melon heads that held brains about 30 percent larger than our own.
That’s what fascinates psychiatrist Gary Lynch and cognitive scientist Richard Granger. “Just as we’re smarter than apes, they were probably smarter than us,” they speculate. More insightful and self-reflective than modern humans, with fantastic memories and a penchant for dreaming, the Boskops may have had “an internal mental life literally beyond anything we can imagine.” Lynch and Granger base their characterization on our current understanding of how the human brain works, describing in detail its physiology and structure and comparing it with the brains of other primates. They also explore what the Boskops’ big brains tell us about evolution (why didn’t they survive?) and about the future of human intelligence (can we engineer bigger brains?). These are questions, one suspects, that even the smallest-brained Boskop would have approved of.
When Lisa Kelly learned she had leukemia in late 2006, her doctor advised her to seek urgent care at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. But the nonprofit hospital refused to accept Mrs. Kelly's limited insurance. It asked for $105,000 in cash before it would admit her.
Sitting in the hospital's business office, Mrs. Kelly says she told M.D. Anderson's representatives that she had some money to pay for treatment, but couldn't get all the cash they asked for that day. "Are they going to send me home?" she recalls thinking. "Am I going to die?"
A growing trend in the hospital industry means cancer patients like Lisa Kelly are being asked to pay cash upfront before receiving treatment.
Hospitals are adopting a policy to improve their finances: making medical care contingent on upfront payments. Typically, hospitals have billed people after they receive care. But now, pointing to their burgeoning bad-debt and charity-care costs, hospitals are asking patients for money before they get treated.
Hospitals say they have turned to the practice because of a spike in patients who don't pay their bills. Uncompensated care cost the hospital industry $31.2 billion in 2006, up 44% from $21.6 billion in 2000, according to the American Hospital Association.
The bad debt is driven by a larger number of Americans who are uninsured or who don't have enough insurance to cover medical costs if catastrophe strikes. Even among those with adequate insurance, deductibles and co-payments are growing so big that insured patients also have trouble paying hospitals.
• The Issue: Hospitals are asking patients for payment before receiving treatment.
• The Background: Hospitals say the practice is needed because of an increase in the number of people not paying their bills.
• The Bottom Line: While hospitals provide care to the poor, uninsured and underinsured people are likely to be hardest hit.
Letting bad debt balloon unchecked would threaten hospitals' finances and their ability to provide care, says Richard Umbdenstock, president of the American Hospital Association. Hospitals would rather discuss costs with patients upfront, he says. "After, when it's an ugly surprise or becomes contentious, it doesn't work for anybody."
M.D. Anderson says it went to a new upfront-collection system for initial visits in 2005 after its unpaid patient bills jumped by $18 million to $52 million that year. The hospital said its increasing bad-debt load threatened its mission to cure cancer, a goal on which it spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
The change had the desired effect: The hospital's bad debt fell to $33 million the following year.
Asking patients to pay after they've received treatment is "like asking someone to pay for the car after they've driven off the lot," says John Tietjen, vice president for patient financial services at M.D. Anderson. "The time that the patient is most receptive is before the care is delivered."
M.D. Anderson says it provides assistance or free care to poor patients who can't afford treatment. It says it acted appropriately in Mrs. Kelly's case because she wasn't indigent, but underinsured. http://louis3j3sheehan.blogspot.com/
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The hospital says it wouldn't accept her insurance because the payout, a maximum of $37,000 a year, would be less than 30% of the estimated costs of her care.
Tenet Healthcare and HCA, two big, for-profit hospital chains, say they have also been asking patients for upfront payments before admitting them. While the practice has received little notice, some patient advocates and health-care experts find it harder to justify at nonprofit hospitals, given their benevolent mission and improving financial fortunes.
An Ohio State University study found net income per bed nearly tripled at nonprofit hospitals to $146,273 in 2005 from $50,669 in 2000. According to the American Hospital Directory, 77% of nonprofit hospitals are in the black, compared with 61% of for-profit hospitals. Nonprofit hospitals are exempt from taxes and are supposed to channel the income they generate back into their operations. Many have used their growing surpluses to reward their executives with rich pay packages, build new wings and accumulate large cash reserves.
M.D. Anderson, which is part of the University of Texas, is a nonprofit institution exempt from taxes. In 2007, it recorded net income of $310 million, bringing its cash, investments and endowment to nearly $1.9 billion.
"When you have that much money in the till and that much profit, it's kind of hard to say no" to sick patients by asking for money upfront, says Uwe Reinhardt, a health-care economist at Princeton University, who thinks all hospitals should pay taxes. Nonprofit organizations "shouldn't behave this way," he says.
It isn't clear how many of the nation's 2,033 nonprofit hospitals require upfront payments. A voluntary 2006 survey by the Internal Revenue Service found 14% of 481 nonprofit hospitals required patients to pay or make an arrangement to pay before being admitted. It was the first time the agency asked that question.
Nataline Sarkisyan, a 17-year-old cancer patient who died in December waiting for a liver transplant, drew national attention when former presidential candidate John Edwards lambasted her health insurer for refusing to pay for the operation. But what went largely unnoticed is that Ms. Sarkisyan's hospital, UCLA Medical Center, a nonprofit hospital that is part of the University of California system, refused to do the procedure after the insurance denial unless the family paid it $75,000 upfront, according to the family's lawyer, Tamar Arminak.
The family got that money together, but then the hospital demanded $300,000 to cover costs of caring for Nataline after surgery, Ms. Arminak says.
UCLA says it can't comment on the case because the family hasn't given its consent. http://louis4j4sheehan4esquire.blogspot.com/
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A spokeswoman says UCLA doesn't have a specific policy regarding upfront payments, but works with patients on a case-by-case basis.
Federal law requires hospitals to treat emergencies, such as heart attacks or injuries from accidents. But the law doesn't cover conditions that aren't immediately life-threatening.
At the American Cancer Society, which runs call centers to help patients navigate financial problems, more people are saying they're being asked for large upfront payments by hospitals that they can't afford. "My greatest concern is that there are substantial numbers of people who need cancer care" who don't get it, "usually for financial reasons," says Otis Brawley, chief medical officer.
Mrs. Kelly's ordeal began in 2006, when she started bruising easily and was often tired. Her husband, Sam, nagged her to see a doctor.
A specialist in Lake Jackson, a town 50 miles from Houston, diagnosed Mrs. Kelly with acute leukemia, a cancer of the blood that can quickly turn fatal. The small cancer center in Lake Jackson refers acute leukemia patients to M.D. Anderson.
When Mrs. Kelly called M.D. Anderson to make an appointment, the hospital told her it wouldn't accept her insurance, a type called limited-benefit.
"When an insurer is going to pay the small amounts, we don't feel financially able to assume the risk," says M.D. Anderson's Mr. Tietjen.
An estimated one million Americans have limited-benefit plans. Usually less expensive than traditional plans, such insurance is popular among people like Mrs. Kelly who don't have health insurance through an employer.
Mrs. Kelly, 52, signed up for AARP's Medical Advantage plan, underwritten by UnitedHealth Group Inc., three years ago after she quit her job as a school-bus driver to help care for her mother. Her husband was retired after a career as a heavy-equipment operator. She says that at the time, she hardly ever went to the doctor. "I just thought I needed some kind of insurance policy because you never know what's going to happen," says Mrs. Kelly. She paid premiums of $185 a month.
A spokeswoman for UnitedHealth, one of the country's largest marketers of limited-benefit plans, says the plan is "meant to be a bridge or a gap filler." She says UnitedHealth has reimbursed Mrs. Kelly $38,478.36 for her medical costs. Because the hospital wouldn't accept her insurance, Mrs. Kelly paid bills herself, and submitted them to her insurer to get reimbursed.
See documents related to Mrs. Kelly's case.
• Mrs. Kelly's certificate of coverage1 through the AARP.
• Mrs. Kelly's May 2007 bill2 from M.D. Anderson.
• One of the letters Ms. Wallack sent3 on behalf of Mrs. Kelly, questioning some of M.D. Anderson's charges
• The hospital's response4
• Letter from M.D. Anderson5 to Mrs. Kelly, regarding a refund for a misbilled item
• Collection notice6 sent to Mrs. Kelly
• Letter from M.D. Anderson7 offering a 10% discount for paying the balance in full by April 30.
M.D. Anderson viewed Mrs. Kelly as uninsured and told her she could get an appointment only if she brought a certified check for $45,000. http://louis6j6sheehan6esquire.blogspot.com/
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The Kellys live comfortably, but didn't have that kind of cash on hand. They own an apartment building and a rental house that generate about $11,000 a month before taxes and maintenance costs. They also earn interest income of about $35,000 a year from two retirement accounts funded by inheritances left by Mrs. Kelly's mother and Mr. Kelly's father.
Mr. Kelly arranged to borrow the money from his father's trust, which was in probate proceedings. Mrs. Kelly says she told the hospital she had money for treatment, but didn't realize how high her medical costs would get.
The Kellys arrived at M.D. Anderson with a check for $45,000 on Dec. 6, 2006. After having blood drawn and a bone-marrow biopsy, the hospital oncologist wanted to admit Mrs. Kelly right away.
But the hospital demanded an additional $60,000 on the spot. It told her the $45,000 had paid for the lab tests, and it needed the additional cash as a down payment for her actual treatment.
In the hospital business office, Mrs. Kelly says she was crying, exhausted and confused.
The hospital eventually lowered its demand to $30,000. Mr. Kelly lost his cool. "What part don't you understand?" he recalls saying. "We don't have any more money today. Are you going to admit her or not?" The hospital says it was trying to work with Mrs. Kelly, to find an amount she could pay.
Mrs. Kelly was granted an "override" and admitted at 7 p.m.
After eight days, she emerged from the hospital. Chemotherapy would continue for more than a year, as would requests for upfront payments. At times, she arrived at the hospital and learned her appointment was "blocked." That meant she needed to go to the business office first and make a payment.
One day, Mrs. Kelly says, nurses wouldn't change the chemotherapy bag in her pump until her husband made a new payment. She says she sat for an hour hooked up to a pump that beeped that it was out of medicine, until he returned with proof of payment.
A hospital spokesperson says "it is very difficult to imagine that a nursing staff would allow a patient to sit with a beeping pump until a receipt is presented." The hospital regrets if patients are inconvenienced by blocked appointments, she says, but it "is a necessary process to keep patients informed of their mounting bills and to continue dialog about financial obligations." She says appointments aren't blocked for patients who require urgent care.
Once, Mrs. Kelly says she was on an exam table awaiting her doctor, when he walked in with a representative from the business office. After arguing about money, she says the representative suggested moving her to another facility.
But the cancer center in Lake Jackson wouldn't take her back because it didn't have a blood bank or an infectious-disease specialist. "It risks a person's life by doing that [type of chemotherapy] at a small institution," says Emerardo Falcon Jr., of the Brazosport Cancer Center in Lake Jackson.
Ron Walters, an M.D. Anderson physician who gets involved in financial decisions about patients, says Mrs. Kelly's subsequent chemotherapy could have been handled locally. He says he is sorry if she was offended that the payment representative accompanied the doctor into the exam room, but it was an example of "a coordinated teamwork approach."
On TV one night, Mrs. Kelly saw a news segment about people who try to get patients' bills reduced. She contacted Holly Wallack, who is part of a group that works on contingency to reduce patients' bills; she keeps one-third of what she saves clients.
Ms. Wallack began firing off complaints to M.D. Anderson. She said Mrs. Kelly had been billed more than $360 for blood tests that most insurers pay $20 or less for, and up to $120 for saline pouches that cost less than $2 at retail.
On one bill, Mrs. Kelly was charged $20 for a pair of latex gloves. On another itemized bill, Ms. Wallack found this: CTH SIL 2M 7FX 25CM CLAMP A4356, for $314. http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.blogspot.com/
It turned out to be a penis clamp, used to control incontinence.
M.D. Anderson's prices are reasonable compared with other hospitals, Mr. Tietjen says. The $20 price for the latex gloves, for example, takes into account the costs of acquiring and storing gloves, ones that are ripped and not used and ones used for patients who don't pay at all, he says. The charge for the penis clamp was a "clerical error" he says; a different type of catheter was used, but the hospital waived the charge. The hospital didn't reduce or waive other charges on Mrs. Kelly's bills.
Mrs. Kelly is continuing her treatment at M.D. Anderson. In February, a new, more comprehensive insurance plan from Blue Cross Blue Shield that she has switched to started paying most of her new M.D. Anderson bills. But she is still personally responsible for $145,155.65 in bills incurred before February. She is paying $2,000 a month toward those. Last week, she learned that after being in remission for more than a year, her leukemia has returned.
M.D. Anderson is giving Blue Cross Blue Shield a 25% discount on the new bills. This month, the hospital offered Mrs. Kelly a 10% discount on her balance, but only if she pays $130,640.08 by this Wednesday, April 30. She is still hoping to get a bigger discount, though numerous requests have been denied. The hospital says it gives commercial insurers a bigger discount because they bring volume and they are less risky than people who pay on their own.
The hospital has urged Mrs. Kelly to sell assets. But she worries about losing her family's income and retirement savings. Mrs. Kelly says she wants to pay, but, suspicious of the charges she's seen, she says, "I want to pay what's fair."
"Basic Instinct" director Paul Verhoeven has written a book that contradicts biblical teaching by suggesting that Jesus might have been fathered by a Roman soldier who raped Mary.
An Amsterdam publishing house said Wednesday it will publish the Dutch filmmaker's biography of Jesus, "Jesus of Nazareth: A Realistic Portrait," in September.
Verhoeven is best known as the director of blockbuster films including "Basic Instinct" and "RoboCop," but he is also a member of "Jesus Seminar," a group of scholars and authors that seeks to establish historical facts about Jesus.
Marianna Sterk of the publishing house J.M. Meulenhoff said the book includes several ideas that run contrary to Christian faith, including the suggestion that Jesus could be the son of a Roman soldier who raped Mary during a Jewish uprising against Roman rule in 4 B.C.
The book also claims that Judas Iscariot was not responsible for Jesus' betrayal, she said.
The movie director's claims were greeted with some skepticism among those who have dedicated their careers to studying the life of Jesus. One issue is that there is very little information about the life of Jesus outside of the Gospels. http://louis9j9sheehan9esquire.blogspot.com/
The Gospels as understood by Christians for nearly 2,000 years do not support Verhoeven's ideas.
William Portier, a professor of religious studies at the University of Dayton, in Ohio, said the Jesus Seminar is known for making provocative claims, but "they are real scholars — you have to deal with them."
However, he said Verhoeven's ideas sounded "pretty out there."
John Dominic Crossan, a Jesus Seminar founder, agreed. He said that while Verhoeven was a member in good standing, there is little evidence for the view that Jesus was illegitimate.
Crossan said the claim is first reported in a polemic written in the second century against the Book of Matthew, intended for a Jewish audience.
"It's an obvious first retort to claims that Mary was a virgin," Crossan said. "If you wanted to do a hatchet job on Jesus' reputation, this would be the way."
The most likely scenario for people who don't accept that Jesus was literally the son of God and had no human father is simply that he was the son of Joseph, Crossan said.
Sterk said the book will be translated into English in 2009. Verhoeven hopes it will be a springboard for him to raise interest in making a film along the same lines, she said.
Verhoeven, 69, has dreamed of making a movie about Jesus' life for decades, she said.
Asked whether it would be difficult to follow Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" and Martin Scorsese's "The Last Temptation of Christ," she said Verhoeven knows he may be somewhat late to market.
"He is painfully aware of that," she said. "However, he has quite a different angle."
With a unanimous Senate vote Thursday, Congress is poised to clear landmark legislation barring insurers and employers from discriminating based on a person's genetic makeup, a move many employers dislike but one that could accelerate both genetic testing and research on personalized medicine.
After more than a decade of deliberation, the Senate cleared the bill 95-0 Thursday. The same bill is expected to sail through the House early next week -- just as a similar measure did a year ago -- and on to President Bush, who is expected to sign it.
The legislation would bar insurance companies from denying health coverage or charging higher premiums based on a person's genetic information. It would also bar employers from using genetic information to make hiring, firing and other job-placement decisions. http://louisjjjsheehan.blogspot.com/
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It applies to people who have genes that carry the risk of disease, but not to those who already have the disease.
"Since no one is born with perfect genes, each one of us is a potential victim of genetic discrimination," said Rep. Louise M. Slaughter (D., N.Y.), a microbiologist, who has introduced the bill each term since 1995. "By prohibiting the improper use of genetic information, this bill encourages Americans to undergo the testing necessary for early treatment and prevention of genetic-based diseases."
"This is tremendous news for patients and researchers," said Daniel W. Jones, president of the American Heart Association. "We are now one step closer to realizing genetics' full potential in fighting heart disease and stroke. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com/
Americans will be relieved to know that they will not be denied employment or basic health care because of their genetic makeup."
But some employer groups aren't happy, even with some changes aimed at limiting lawsuits. Among other things, the bill requires individuals who want to sue an employer to first get approval from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which represents three million businesses, sees the legislation as "more paperwork, more expense and more litigation," as Michael Eastman, the group's executive director of labor policy, put it. He posited that human-resources offices might run into difficulties if an employee requests time off to care for a relative with a genetic ailment.
In addition, Mr. Eastman said, the bill doesn't pre-empt about 35 state laws addressing genetic discrimination, still leaving a patchwork of rules nationwide that businesses must follow.
Neil Trautwein, a vice president at the National Retail Federation, also expressed concerns about increased litigation, saying employees contemplating age- or gender-bias lawsuits could easily include genetic discrimination. "The kitchen sink is thrown at employers," he said.
Health plans have largely supported the legislation. Karen Ignagni, president and chief executive of the trade group America's Health Insurance Plans, said, "While the legislation gives patients the peace of mind to know that their genetic information can't be misused, it promotes informed health-care decision-making."
Aetna Inc., the country's third-largest health insurer in terms of medical-plan members, said the legislation would have little effect on its own underwriting policies. It established a policy in 2002 not to use genetic testing in underwriting and to cover genetic testing that would inform a patient's treatment decision.
Individuals who seek to buy health insurance on their own are subject to eligibility decisions and rates based on pre-existing health conditions. While this legislation would bar health insurers from using individuals' genetic risk of disease for these purposes, it doesn't change the larger practice of using pre-existing health conditions in such coverage decisions.
A survey by Johns Hopkins University's Genetics and Public Policy Center last year found 92% of the adults surveyed were concerned that genetic information could be used against them. Just 24% said they trusted health insurers with such information, and only 16% trusted their employers.
Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health, said individualized disease-prevention programs aren't "going to happen if people are afraid to get the information in the first place." http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire1.blogspot.com/
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Dr. Collins suggested the legislation, by allaying patients' fears, could boost participation in research trials.
The legislation, which has been under intense negotiation for weeks, was held up by Sen. Tom Coburn (R., Okla.), who lifted his hold on the bill earlier this week after lawmakers agreed to a "firewall" so that companies couldn't be sued twice, both as employers and insurers.
This case was first reported by the Associated Press, Johannesburg, S. Africa, Sept.17, 1965, and first published in the United States by NICAP. The first information was related by UFO investigator and writer Richard Hall. This case, though not heavy in detail, features a vehicle encounter, UFO landing, and physical traces, along with official secrecy.
The events occurred as Constable John Lockem and Koos de Klerek were doing routine patrol on the Pretoria-Bronkhorstspruit road. It was just past midnight when to their utter amazement, the lights on their police van lit up an object ahead of them on the road. Sitting right on the highway was a disc-shaped object. The object was not anything they had seen before.
With the object lit up from their headlights, it appeared to be of a copper color, and was about 30 feet in diameter. After only a few seconds, the UFO began to rise above the road, and quickly sped away, throwing flames from double tubes of some type on the bottom. The two men must have been in awe, wondering from where the strange, unknown object had come from, and where it was going. Later as the men reported their unusual encounter, Constable Lockem stated: "Its lift-off was quicker than anything I have ever seen." Flames from the asphalt road had shot up into the air about 3 feet, according to the witnesses. The heat was so intense that the fire lasted for a time, even after the object had zoomed away.
Further investigation indicated that parts of the road had caved in, as if from a heavy object resting on it. The gravel had been separated from the tar in an area severely burned about six feet in diameter, indicating the center underneath of the UFO. An official investigation into the incident was carried out by Lt. Col. J.B. Brits, District Commandant of Pretoria North.
In an interview for a local newspaper, Brits told reporters that the case of the UFO landing was considered "as being of a highly secret nature and an inquiry is being conducted in top circles." Samples of the damaged road material were taken by a scientific agency for analysis, but the results were never released to the public. Because of the location of the event, and its age, it is unlikely that more information will be forthcoming. The case remains unexplained.
SDI: Our guest for tonight has degrees from Harvard in government, law and divinity. He established the Christic Institute in Washington D.C., and has been legal counsel on many high profile cases... Cases such as Karen Silkwood for example -- Iran-Contra, the American Sanctuary Movement, the Pentagon papers, Three Mile Island and Watergate. He has gained access to many restricted government files. Danny has represented John Mack, chairman of the Harvard Department of Clinical Psychology, after Harvard tried to fire him after he published "Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens." http://louis2j2sheehan2esquire.blogspot.com/
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Mack tried to publish an article on his research in the New England Journal of Medicine, but the editorial board wouldn't even consider it, so he wrote the book. Daniel Sheehan, funded by Laurance Rockefeller, resolved the case against John Mack very quickly. Daniel Sheehan has said that many members of the human family are not properly prepared for open contact with extraterrestrials. In May he appeared with many UFO-related witnesses with the Disclosure Project at a Washington Press Conference. Joining us from his home in California is lawyer Daniel Sheehan... (A short segment ensued where Steven Bassett, held over from the hour before, says hello to Sheehan and thanks him for the work that he has done over the last year to advance the Disclosure process.) [The interview began with a short clip of Sheehan recounting his experience of seeing classified materials in the basement of a building of the Library of Congress in 1977.]
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SDI: Dan Sheehan. You have been a busy man since you were last on this program which was back in October, many months ago.
DS: Yes I remember.
SDI: That was a clip that we played from your last appearance with us. Were the documents that they showed you . . . were they identified in any way? Were there classification marks on them?
DS: No, no. As I had mentioned they were in a set of boxes, which were sort of like shoe box-sized boxes, kind of off-khaki green color. There were many, many of them in this room. What I did is I just started going through one at a time. I was looking at the photographs. The photographs didn't have any classification markings on them. They were in these little metal containers, almost like little film canisters. They didn't have any classification stamps or documents on them. All I know is this is where I was told to go by Marcia Smith. When I got there they knew that I was coming. They checked my identification, and cleared me into the room. They didn't ask for any special verification, whether I had special classified status or anything. So I just went in and took advantage of the opportunity.
SDI: Daniel take us back to how this all started. You're obviously out for the truth, the facts. You are, because of who you are, in a position to gain some access, gain some information, credibility, to allow this information and these hidden documents to come forward. Tell us how this all started for those of us who are really not familiar, so we can discuss it and take it from there.
DS: Well it started with - interestingly enough - I have mentioned it before, that I was actually having dinner with Rosemary Chalk who was the Secretary of the National Academy of Science in Washington D.C. I happened to know her. I was General Counsel at the Jesuit National Headquarters, Office of National Social ministry. We went to church together, and I had talked to her at church, with a number of other people. She invited me to dinner at her home, in Washington D.C. I was there. This was in late 1976, sometime and I was having dinner with her - I've explained this all a dozen times now. She was telling me that based on the cases I had worked on up to that time that she assumed that I must have been just a born lawyer - that I'd always wanted to be a lawyer my whole life - that I must have been thinking of this since I was a kid. I told her actually no. I was actually wanting to be an astronaut, and that I was an applicant to the United States Academy in 1963 when I was a senior in high school. I had actually been one of the finalists in New York State to be appointed to the Air Force Academy, so I could go there and join the astronaut program. It's a long story, but Senator Jacob Javits ended up giving the appointment to someone else. He told me to go get the appointment from my Congressman. My Congressman, Carlton King, had given the appointment to the son of the mayor of Glen's Falls, the biggest city in my county. So I was sort of flabbergasted by all this, and offended at it, so I decided, because I was not going to get into the Air Force Academy, I should become a lawyer, thinking that I would just have to do a little fine tuning to keep things like this unfair act from happening again or taking place in the future. http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.blogspot.com/
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Turned out that it was a much longer duty than I thought it was going to be. Ended up spending the next thirty years of my life full time involved in social justice litigations. So I explained this to her, and she was kind of flabbergasted that I really wanted to be an astronaut. She asked me why I wanted to be an astronaut, and I said that I thought that the most one exciting single event that was going on in our lifetime was the reaching out into outer space, with the potential contact with extraterrestrial civilizations. She was very surprised by this, and she said "Gees, there's a person who I should introduce you to. She's a friend of mine." She said, "Her name is Marcia Smith, and she is the director of the Science and Technology Division of the Library of Congress' Congressional Research Service. She's been working on a number of projects, and doing research on UFO stuff and extraterrestrial intelligence." So it was Rosemary Chalk who introduced me to Marcia. Sometime, there after, I met Marcia. Marcia told me that she had been asked by the Science and Technology Committee of the Library of Congress to undertake an evaluation of two separate issues. One was the potential existence of extraterrestrial intelligence. The second was the evaluation of the data on these phenomena of UFOs. I was pleasantly surprised to find that in her official capacity as director of the Official Congressional Research Service, that she had been asked by the United States Congress to do this investigation. This went on for some period of time. I made inquiries about how this thing got started. Who was it that wanted to have this thing done? It turned out that President Carter, then in 1977, when he had actually come into office . . . it turned out that President Carter had had a sighting when he was still governor of Georgia. He and a number of other people had seen a UFO and he had written an official report and asked that it be investigated. So it turned out that when he came to the Presidency, he had actually asked to have the information regarding the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence and the UFO phenomena sent to him. This procedure of asking the United States Congress - The Science and Technology Committee of the House of Representatives to have the Science and Technology Division of the Library of Congress Congressional Research Service gather all this information together, and make a determination about what information was going to be released to the public, and how much was going to be made available to Congress could be made in that context. So it was in that context that I was talking to Marcia Smith, and Marcia asked me whether as General Counsel to the United States Jesuit Headquarters, there at their National Office in Washington D.C., whether or not I could get access to the section of the Vatican library in Rome that would contain this information - any information that the church had on extraterrestrial intelligence and the UFO phenomenon. I was very pleased to try to do that. So I asked Father Bill Davis, who was the Director of the National Office at that time (1977) if I could follow that process of trying to get that information from the Vatican. He gave me his official approval, so I undertook that process, but much to my surprise in fact, and much to the surprise of Father Davis I might add, we were refused access to that particular portion of the Vatican Library. So I sent back a second letter to the Jesuit who was the head of the Vatican library, and explained to him that this was an official request that had come from the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress - that it had come from the Congress of the United States, and that the President himself had wanted to get this information. So I thought that would get us the information, but I received a second response from the Vatican Library saying no - the Jesuit National Headquarters would not be provided with this information. So I had to regretfully report that back to Marcia Smith letting her know that I was not able to get it. So I hadn't heard from Marcia in a while, and she called me and told me that the United States Congress had cut, in half I believe, the funding for the SETI program, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence project at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, and wanted to know if I, in my capacity as the General Counsel for the Jesuit Headquarters Office of Social Ministry that dealt with public policy, she asked if I would be willing to join a group of former astronauts, and some other people to go and meet with a number of key congressmen to lobby them - to ask them to reinstate these funds for SETI. I was more than happy to do that. http://louis3j3sheehan3.blogspot.com/
Again I got permission from Father Bill Davis, and he consented to this, so I participated with them. Shortly after the full funding was reinstated for the SETI project I was then asked. Marcia called me from the Library of Congress, telling me that the scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in the SETI program, wanted to have me give them a seminar out at JPL talking about the potential theological religious implications of potential contact with extraterrestrial civilizations. I was delighted to do that, so I said to Marcia "Look if I am going to be doing this, which I am totally delighted to do, I would like to be able to get access to some of the data that you might have available in the course of your doing this investigation for the Science and Technology Committee in Congress. So she said, "Well what would you like to see?" It didn't take me a second to tell her what I wanted. I would like to see the classified sections of the Project Blue Book. Well, she said that she didn't know whether the Air Force and the Department of Defense would agree to release these to the Library of Congress, but she would try. So she contacted them and shortly thereafter she called me and she said, much to her surprise, "They have agreed to do this." So she gave me a particular date and time and told me that I should go over to the new building at the Library of Congress, which was on the other side of Independence Avenue. I had mentioned before, when asked about this, this building had not even been opened yet. There were no people in it. I went over there, I believe it was on a Saturday morning and brought my identification. I went to the door, and there was an Executive Protective Service officer at the front door of the library. I showed him my identification. He was a little puzzled because there was nobody in the building; no offices had been opened yet. I showed him my identification, and he made a call. A little bit to his surprise he said, "Yes, you are expected." So I went in, and he told me what room I was expected to go to. I went down the hall, and went downstairs into the basement looking for this room. I found this place, and there was a room and these two security officers there at the door, and there was actually a third, plainclothed, sitting at a desk to the right of them. As I came in there I showed them all my identification, and they checked some documentation that they had, and said "Yes. I was supposed to be here." As I started to go in, the man sitting at the desk told me I had to leave my briefcase there. I wouldn't be allowed to take any notes. It turned out I had a yellow pad under my arm, so I set the briefcase down, gave it to him, and I went into the room. I was in there for some time. http://louis3j3sheehan.blogspot.com/
There were a bunch of documents there. There was actually a film machine. It was like a little reel-to-reel-kind of a film machine there. I don't know if it was 35mm, or whatever those things were -- so there was actually some little films there. I looked at some of the films and they were like the classic films that you have seen, sort of far distant shots of strange moving vehicles. So I decided I wasn't making much headway on this, so I began to look into these little boxes, that had these canisters there. There was one of these overhead filmstrip machines that was sitting in the room. I began to take these little canisters out, and open them up, and put the filmstrips in and look through these things. I don't know how many I had gone through. I had gone through several, or at least a few of these boxes, when I hit upon this one canister that had film and pictures. I started going through, turning the little crank and there it was. http://louis0j0sheehan0esquire.blogspot.com/
Again I have told people about this a number of times. There were these photographs of unmistakable -- of a UFO sitting on the ground. It had crashed, apparently. It had hit into this field and had dug up, kind of plowed this kind of trough through this field. It was wedged into the side of this bank. There was snow all around the picture. The vehicle was wedged into the side of this mud-like embankment -- kind of up at an angle. There were Air Force personnel. As I cranked the little handle, and looked at additional photos, these Air Force people were taking pictures. In the photograph they were taking photographs of this vehicle. One of the photos actually had the Air Force personnel with this big long tape measure measuring this thing. You could see that they had these parkas on, with little fur around their hoods. You could see that they had the little name tags on their jacket. They were clearly U.S. Air Force personnel. I was kind-of in this strange state saying: "Here it is!" So I turned the crank for more pictures, and I could see on the side of this craft these, like, little insignias - little symbols. So I turned ahead a couple of pictures to see if there was a closer picture. Sure enough, there was. One of the photos had kind of a close-up picture of these symbols. So what I did is -- I was getting nervous -- I looked around, and the guys weren't watching or anything. They were outside of the room, so I took the yellow pad, and I flipped it open to the little grey cardboard backing and I flipped it under the screen. I shrank the size of the picture to the exact same size as the back of the yellow pad, and traced the actual symbols out in detail, verbatim of what was there. Then I said, like, I'm going to leave. That's it. I've got this, and I don't want to push my luck on this thing... (Commercial break)
SDI: Danny, a long row you have been hoeing there. You said that over in '76 when you were at a friend's place for dinner, culminating in this recent sit-down, in a yet-to-be occupied basement of a building in Washington, to be privy to some very interesting, if not incredible, documentation and pictures -- what have you. Now, we are going to ask you some questions and move on from there in terms of what you saw, and what can be accomplished by this revelation. You were still finishing the story when we broke for the news.
DS: It's just that once I had copied these out -- I have thought about this a lot of times since that time because it was a little peculiar since I was there -- I was authorized to be there. I had been cleared into the place, even though they told me I couldn't take any notes or anything. Once I had actually seen these pictures, and actually chosen to copy down and trace these symbols from this craft, I just decided that I should get out of there. So I got up, closed the little pad, and I put the film back in the canister. I put all the boxes back where they were, and put the yellow pad under my arm, and just walked out. As I came through the door, I went over to get my briefcase up, and the man at the little desk that was sitting there pointed to the yellow pad under my arm, and he said, "What's that that you've got there?" I said,"That's the yellow pad that I had with me." He said, "Let me see that." He reached out and I handed it to him. He flipped through the yellow pages, and never looked at the back, never looked at the inside cardboard backing, and handed it back to me. http://louis4j4sheehan4esquire.blogspot.com/
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So, I just put it under my arm, got my briefcase and walked out of there. I went right back to Jesuit National Headquarters, and told Father Bill Davis about this, and asked to convene a meeting of the 54 heads of the national Religious Organizations through the Washington Inter-religious Staff Council to ask for a special retreat for the churches to discuss potential issues that the Democratic and Republican parties had not yet taken positions on. It was a general session, and I raised the issue with them to see if they would agree to start looking into and authorize a major official investigation of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence and the potential secreting of information by the Executive Branch of the United States Government of the existence of this phenomena. They basically didn't want to do it, and so I was kind of kicking myself. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.blogspot.com/
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So, then I went and gave the presentation to the SETI people at JPL -- big three-hour seminar discussing the potential theological implications of contact with extraterrestrial civilizations. I know that the reports came out -- that Marcia Smith in the Library of Congress prepared two separate reports. One was specifically restricted to the issue of extraterrestrial intelligence, and the other one was on the phenomena of the UFOs. So I actually saw copies of these that Marcia showed me that she had completed, and that was that.
SD; There is obviously a desire from inside to get this information out, to get some real concrete action here -- some headway made, otherwise you wouldn't have been sitting there in that basement.
DS: It would seem that something had happened, and that's why I was surprised a little bit with President Carter in the presidency, having reportedly seen one of these, this report having been prepared, submitted to the Science and Technology Committee of the Library of Congress, that something didn't happen. Of course, you will recall that it was a peculiar type of presidency with President Carter. He was very much under siege by extreme conservative forces that were actually inside his National Security Council. Donald P. Greg, for example, was in his NSC. He apparently was regularly reporting secret meetings that they were having all the way to Bill Casey, who was the head of the Republican campaign to try and oust Carter from the Presidency to the point, as you know, of intervening in the efforts that President Carter was making to negotiate for the release of the American hostages from Iran. So it was a terribly disruptive period of time. Gary Sick, who was in the NSC for President Carter at the time, has written a book called "The October Surprise." It actually delineates his conclusions, as an official member of the NSC, that the efforts of the entire Carter administration were being sabotaged by extreme conservative elements that were still in the government that wanted him out of there. It was very difficult apparently for President Carter during that period of time. The only estimate that I can have, is that any idea that he ever had of releasing information about this ended up getting swamped through the gas shortages, the difficulties he had with the hostages, and a whole series of other national security problems. http://louis6j6sheehan6esquire.blogspot.com/
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SDI: If we can go back to the room in the basement. You said on your way in, there were a couple of security people there. Were they military security? Were they Wackenhut? What were they?
DS: I didn't ask them for their credentials! As I recall they were civilians. They guy that was at the chair and the desk. He was in civilian clothes. The other two guys . . . they had extreme military bearing, but they were in private clothes -- in suits and ties, but I got the impression that they were military. The other fellow gave off the vibes of a civilian.
SD; The other question of course is what became of the yellow pad with the cardboard backing?
DS: Oh, I still have that. SDI: You do?
DS: Oh yes.
SDI: Has anyone analyzed that? Have you had anyone take a look at that?
DS: Well actually, no. I've got it in all my Jesuit Headquarters files. I have them all in file drawers that are in the basement of the garage.
SDI: What would be the chances of doing a scan of or reproduction of...
DS: Well, I'm obviously going to have to do that one of these days. You know when I got asked to give a presentation to MUFON, I figured it was just important to tell people about this. I guess I should have realized the potential importance of the data. There should come a time when I should dig these documents out, and make them available, which I am going to have to do.
SDI: Actually, it's extremely interesting because there are people who contribute to this program who claim they have seen what they believe are alien symbols, and there have been reports of other symbols that have been seen on objects in the sky, and it would be interesting to compare what they've seen and what you managed to bring out of that room with you.
DS: Yes. It's true. You see I had expected frankly that by this time that I would have been asked by our community -- the UFO community -- would have been interested in having a major professional investigation undertaken. So, I always said to myself, when that time comes, then I know it would be politically time to bring this forth and to integrate this into a major professional investigation. Much to my surprise, it still hasn't happened.
SDI: So in the world that is UFO investigation you have been waiting for the proper vehicle to come forward, but perhaps, shall we say, a little frustrated with the mechanics of the UFO world out there -- it's treatment of what you have done, and how this is all going to play itself out in a factual or respectable manner?
DS: Well, it's a difficult issue. As you know I think that there are real efforts under way now by members of the post-war generation, now that we are past the cold war. Even though it was 10 years ago, it seems like it happened just yesterday, that we are in this new era. It seems to me that we now have an opportunity in this particular area of public policy, to become much more sophisticated in this public policy arena to come together, very importantly, I've raised this twice now in presentations that I've made. This extraordinary inclination that seems to be present in this particular community of attacking, and setting upon each other, over various minutia of their various reports. I think that what I want to do is participate in gathering people together, to come together to discuss these things in an intelligent way, to combine our forces and our resources to really focus on a concentrated professional investigation. This is what our Christic Institute set about doing in the area of nuclear power, with the Karen Silkwood case, in the areas dealing with the clan and the Nazis, in the case we did in Greensboro, in regards to the Contra military funding, in South America, in the Iran-Contra case. It is something that when a public policy really comes to maturity, they eventually come to realize that there needs to be this kind of coalition force in disciplined attention, verifying in detail, through a professional investigation, the data that we need to move forward. I'm (unintelligible) the conference that we are going to be having down in Irvine here on the 20th and 21th and 22nd of July for MUFON may well play a major role in bringing people together to focus our resources on such an investigation.
SDI: Ya, that would be good if that would happen. The two reports that you say Marcia Smith had produced and done for Jimmy Carter. You said you saw one, or you said you had seen both?
DS: I saw both of them.
SDI: Were they yet classified?
DS: I don't know. People have asked me that. There wasn't any classified designation on them when I saw them, or when Marcia showed them to me.
SDI: What would you say the odds were for an eager beaver researcher to be able to get their hands on either one of those reports via the Freedom of Information Act there in the states?
DS: I don't know. It would depend upon whether or not they were classified. If they were classified, that's one of the twenty-two grounds on the basis of which the freedom of Information Act will not give you material.
SDI: But I can't see them not being classified, in view of the content, and what you said you saw.
DS: Well, it's not clear. Again, I just don't know. We couldn't tell what it is that was going on at that time. That was right at the time when we were filing the Karen Silkwood case. I had just filed the Karen Silkwood case in November of 1976, and was in the midst of all kinds of preliminary hearings and depositions and such. While I was extremely interested in this, I couldn't tell what was really happening. I was waiting for the President to say something -- to do something, but he got kind of swept up in all those other affairs I mentioned earlier.
SDI: In that room back in Washington, obviously there were other things that you saw. This one particular picture of a plowed furrow in a field, and an object stuck in an embankment, and hieroglyphics. Beyond that, anything else that you took out of that room that was significant in terms of its impact on you?
DS: No, no. I realized that there was probably going to be a limited amount of time that I was going to get to be there, so I first started looking through some of the reels that had documentation on them. I started to say to myself, "Look, if I start trying to look through these documents, I'm going to run out of time." So I was trying to find some key photographs. So that's why I went looking into the canisters looking for a canister that had photographs in it. That's how I happened to come to that particular canister.
SDI: Danny, explain this for me if you would. Amuse me I guess. I am a layman, not a lawyer. Lawyers think differently, and are used to long periods of waiting. If I had come across something like that in a basement in Washington, and done my little sketch, I'd be talking to everyone and anybody about what I had seen. Now explain it away to me, that I'm just a lawyer, I think differently, and things take a long time. http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.blogspot.com/
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Why would you have just not gone public with that?
DS: Well that is interesting. That's a perfectly logical question. At the time when I was in Washington D.C. the thing that I realized, being the general counsel for the Jesuit Headquarters, is that you actually bring information to the proper authority and try to make the legal system work the way it is supposed to work. It took quite some time for me to realize that really it was necessary to go out to the people, and have the people mobilize, rise up against the major institution, and try to force them to do what they were doing. I had come into Washington in 1975, and I was still operating in 1976 and 1977 very much under the idea that we can get these legal institutions to work. Since we had the new President, and I understood that the President knew about this stuff, that he had actually seen one, and that he was going to get copies of this report, that I was anticipating that it was going to start to work. When I was working on the Karen Silkwood case, I was out in Oklahoma most of the time doing depositions regularly, running professional investigators in the field -- into a major confrontation with the Central Intelligence Agency over the potential smuggling of plutonium out of these facilities -- I got kind of swept up in all of that stuff, and I was really very much buried in much of that stuff for the next couple of years. I was surprised frankly, that nothing came out of the White House and the Executive Branch. Basically the time sort of passed for that sort of key piece of information to come out. I was waiting for some stuff to happen. I talked to people about it -- informally when I would see them. That's one of the reasons when people contacted me to talk to John Mack about representing him, I immediately agreed to do that. SDI: Daniel, you obviously carry with you a great deal of credibility -- the cases you have been involved with, the whole Silkwood thing, incredible. Hollywood movies and so forth have come from what you have worked on. Given who you have talked to, what you have been privy to in the way of statements from individuals, documents, pictures, the information that came to you as a result of people trusting your credibility, what do you believe?
DS: (pause) Interesting. Actually, I believe that we are going to have a major private professional investigation sponsored by the UFO community that I am going to get to play a fairly major part in -- I hope. Therefore, I need to remain open to what exactly is going on. I did make a presentation to the International UFO Congress at Laughlin [March 2000] setting forth what I thought were seven or eight different potential explanations for the various phenomena that are going on, and rather than saying that I came to the conclusion that any one of them was true, to the exclusion of others, I believed that some percentage of incidents that have been reported are probably attributable to different phenomena. I laid that out for them at the Congress, as a preliminary view of what were the areas that I thought really needed to be investigated -- what potentials really needed to be looked at with potential explanations for various aspects of this phenomena. Now that having been said, in general, what I believe, I believe that a substantial portion of the very up-close sightings, where you get to see a vehicle that's absolutely clear, that it isn't just a mistaken light of some sort. I think that a substantial plurality of these are in fact vehicles from an extraterrestrial civilization, and I believe that they probably have a means of transporting themselves, which in fact exceeds the speed of light, and for that reason they would appear to be almost other-dimensional. Because when they come out of that mode of transport they appear to sort of materialize and dematerialize from that realm. So what some people think makes these beings extra-dimensional beings, my opinion is that some of them are in fact extraterrestrial. The report that Marcia showed me on extraterrestrial phenomena actually stated that it was the conclusion of the Library of Congress, Science and Technology Division, that from two to six, at least, other highly-intelligent, technologically-developed civilizations exist right within our own galaxy. Now they based this upon the Drake's equation, in working out various probabilities. They are increasing every day now that we discover that other star systems outside of our own star system -- where planets exist. We have discovered evidence of water in other solar systems now. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com/
I think that it's clear that these civilizations exist, and the only question is a fact question: Whether or not they have been capable of developing a mode of transportation that exceeds the speed of light. I believe that they have.
SDI: That is fascinating information that we have here on our desk this evening for this radio program. The House Space Science committee, information coming and statements being made among the advances and discoveries -- at least fifty planets have been found in orbit around distant sun-like stars in the last five years -- and researchers now believe those systems may be common throughout the system. Finding planets was considered an essential step to finding life of course, and that is being done.
DS: I was with my two sons, the night before last, and I said, "It's just amazing. You can tell your great-grandchildren that you were alive right at the time when they discovered other planets outside of our solar system. Now that's just an extraordinary step for human beings to take. My son said to me, "Well, that will probably be dwarfed by the fact that we will probably establish contact with a whole extraterrestrial civilization." I said, "Ya, you're probably right. That's probably true." The big discoveries we are making here each . . . (Part of line missing) SDI: Can you stay for ten to fifteen minutes after the news?
DS: Ya. My wife has agreed to stand by to wait to go out to dinner tonight. So I have agreed to do that.
SDI: We'll just keep you for another ten or fifteen minutes. Good stuff. Dan how did you get hooked-up with the Disclosure Project?
DS: Well, I just got called by Steven Greer, and he asked if I would participate in it and I have been trying over the last year or so to make myself available to each of the major groups that have been involved in the UFO issue, such as the International UFO Congress, MUFON, Steven Greer's group, Dr. John Mack, and others on a kind of an equal basis, so that I can demonstrate I am open to talking to people from all points of view, and actually establish a level of confidence in our relationships together. http://louis8j8sheehan8.blogspot.com/
We can try and draw the people together, and share information, and work together in a common investigation.
SDI: Daniel, perhaps this is the development that we have been waiting for without many of us realizing that that is it. We have been hoping for some critical mass to occur, so that this can become publicly legitimate and properly researched and uncovered as it were. I think to date it has been the hopes of many that there would be enough sightings, that there would be video footage, that there would be enough multiple personal experiences, that someone would have to admit to this. The kind of critical mass that seems to be coming to the fore now is the critical mass that well-noted, well-respected, learned individuals who are now saying, "I am stepping into this arena." People such as yourself. That kind of critical mass is very, very exciting to hear -- someone such as you say what you said before we broke for news: "I believe this is real." That is incredibly exciting.
DS: I think that also the ability of people in our generation, our post-war generation, to actually conduct ourselves in a responsible and civil manner towards each other, even though different people have different points of view. To avoid being scurrilous and antagonistic towards each other is also part of the coming-of-age that really entitles a movement of this sort to receive the type of respect that is going to be necessary in order to get people in high positions of responsibility, both civilian and military, to come forward and to be willing to participate. I have heard many people say, "I don't want to go near that, because they are going to chew you up and kill you." They are not talking about any secret government official. http://louis3j3sheehan3.blogspot.com/
http://louis5j5sheehan.blogspot.com/They are talking about the people in the movement itself. I am hoping that this can in fact be a very important crossing that we make together, and avoid picking on each other's points of view, and try to share different perspectives, to that we can come to a collective of what is really going on here.
SDI: You are very diplomatic but the bottom line is that the UFO community as a whole has a nasty habit of eating it's young and stabbing each other in the back.
DS: Well I just think that what we have to do is that we come to participate. We have to be aware of the fact that this is a risk that we all take when we come into this area, but if we are able to smile and kind of pass aside those kinds of shots taken, and be civil and be respectful of everyone, and try and get people to come together at a common event such as this big MUFON gathering on July 19, 20, 21, and 22nd down in Irvine. If people will come to those things, and say, look, we are all here and we've got five, six, or eight of the top major participants in these investigations. Why don't we try an form some kind of common coalition here, without anyone being the chief of the thing? Why don't we try and work together? I think that this type of collegial decision making, where we take responsibility for ourselves -- not be dependant upon some military authority, government official, or even the President of the United States to come forward and spoon feed us this information, is the type of responsibility that may well be what is essential for us to demonstrate the type of worthiness that is necessary in order to be prepared for this information.
SDI: Excellent point. So in summation, for your moments here with us this evening, what next? Other than the Irvine symposium.
DS: Well, I hope that what we will do is come to an insight, that we pool our resources together and actually sponsor -- I pointed out before when I was on the Art Bell show -- a tribunal which we can actually bring forth and marshal our evidence. Put it forward in a way that is admissible, with present rules of federal civil procedure, that we act responsibly in this way, that we try to do this in a way that will encourage people who have opposing points of view, to those that are held by the UFO community in general, to come forward to try and represent the other side in a responsible and respectful way, and that we can subject the various witnesses to cross-examination and to testing of their evidence. We can then bring on federal judges who will sit in judgment of this. We can empanel a real jury, who can participate in listening to this information, that it can be broadcast over radio and television, or web cast over the Internet so that people can witness this type of major event, so that we can bring the information forward in the most responsible and careful way that we can, and then watch the jury deliberate. We can actually have cameras, live cameras in the room to see regular citizens deliberating on the respectability of the respective witnesses, the different pieces of evidence, and see what kind of conclusion that we can come to here.
SDI: Yes, if we are still not being told, or the information is not forthcoming then what do we accomplish with all that? Those that hold the details, hold the evidence, military, government, whatever, even despite that sort of arena.
DS: Well we have experience that in the past, as you know, the government withheld the information about the dangers of nuclear power, it withheld the information about Watergate, it withheld the information about Iran-Contra. You know the entire Iran-Contra hearings were brought -- the government official hearings -- about only because we as citizens mobilized and prepared this information and brought it forward in a completely comprehensive way. They were finding themselves getting behind the power curve, so they had to respond. You know Ed Meese, the Attorney General, under Ronald Reagan. The only reason he ever asked for the appointment of a special prosecutor was because it was getting out of control. I think that is what we really need to do, kind of a citizens initiative utilizing the standard rules of federal civil procedures in a kind of sophistication that we have learned as a collective community to utilize. That is the exact type of procedure that we need to undertake. If the government chooses to try to respond to it in some way, then that is fine. We will provide a forum for them, to come forward and participate in such a process. It is very much like Harvard Law School when I began at Harvard in 1967. We as a studentry organized the Joint Student Faculty Committee at Harvard Law School. There was no faculty on it, because they wouldn't gain to participate in it, in the kind of sharing of authority to make decisions. Yet, after two full years of holding meetings, the faculty at Harvard found it absolutely essential that they come forward and participate, because they were losing their authority and power. So I think we need to have sort of a citizens diplomacy program coming forward, where we take responsibility for these decisions ourselves. You know, the fact of the matter is, there are images where five hundred or six hundred Jewish people would sit there with two German soldiers holding guns on them, and leading them into a German prison camp. If people would only rise up, and take control of their own lives we cannot be coerced like this. What I think we need to do is mobilize people; utilize the training that our two-post war generations are the most widely educated educations in the history of our human family. We don't have to sit back and wait for someone like the king, or the pope, or someone like this to tell us this information.
http://louis0j0sheehan0esquire.blogspot.com/
We can get this information ourselves, if we are willing to take the responsibility ourselves.
SDI: The time to move forward and take advantage of the inevitable critical mass situation.
DS: Right. Absolutely.
President Jimmy Carter was the first President of the United States of America to have officially reported the UFO he saw to the authorities. He was also the President who said that if elected he would see that UFO-Alien Full Disclosure would take place. That the American public would be told the truth about everything was one of the campaign cries of Jimmy Carter. Carter made a promise he could not or would not be able to keep.
After Carter won the White House, he paid a visit to the then-CIA Director, George Bush. Carter had an interest in UFOs ever since experiencing his first sighting sometime in 1969 while standing outside a Lion's Club in Georgia. His campaign speeches promising to unravel the government's long held cover-up was the "Parting of the Red Sea" for Ufologists not only in America but around the world. Here was the one guy who would open up the "Promised Land" and lead them into Full Disclosure.
Carter wanted the U.S. Government's UFO secret documents declassified. George Bush more or less told Carter that the President of the United States did not have the need to know the information contained in those documents. Can you even begin to imagine that? What lends even more mind-blowing credibility to this alleged event between Carter and Bush is the credibility of the allegation maker: Daniel Sheehan.
Daniel Sheehan was born in1946 and graduated from Harvard Law School. There, he was co-founder of the Harvard Civil Rights and Civil Liberty Law Review. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.blogspot.com/
He went on to work for the American Civil Liberties Union and became general counsel for a host of entities including The Disclosure Project-a group dedicated to getting the U.S. Government to allow full and unfettered access to what the Feds know about the UFO-Alien phenomenon.
According to Sheehan, Bush Senior, who was the CIA Director, refused Carter's request for disclosure of the UFO documents, even to the President of the United States, because it was generally believed in the halls and corridors of the secret, black-ops government that Carter would then turn the truth over to the American people.
Director of a California think tank, Sheehan's credentials are impeccable. Sheehan's career is a litany of high-profile cases like, "legal counsel team for the New York Times' Pentagon Papers case, defense of the Berrigan brothers, going after the Kerr-McGee nuclear plant (Karen Silkwood), Three-Mile Island, Iran-Contra. At the Disclosure Conference, Sheehan says the Bush-Carter story was relayed to him in 1977 by Marcia Smith of the Congressional Research Service, part of the Library of Congress."
Sheehan's interest in this phenomenon came about when Sheehan met Marcia Smith through a mutual acquaintance. http://louis2j2sheehan2esquire2.blogspot.com/
Smith told Sheehan that she was involved in a research project for the Science and Technology Committee of the Library of Congress that would address the issues of the potential existence of extraterrestrial intelligence and make an evaluation of the data on the phenomena of UFOs. When Sheehan queried Smith as to who exactly wanted this study done, her answer was none other than Jimmy Carter.
This all was with a view to investigate exactly what could or could not be turned over to the general public, according to Daniel Sheehan.
Smith asked Sheehan if he could, since he was the then-General Counsel to United States Jesuit Headquarters at their National Office in Washington D.C., get access to the records on the UFO-Alien issue contained in the Vatican. Though Sheehan made repeated attempts to gain access to the Vatican's documents through official channels, he was refused each time.
This makes one wonder just why, if all there is to this UFO-Alien issue is weather balloons, flocks of geese, and swamp gas, would the Vatican (or any government on the earth, for that matter) have top-secret, and highly unattainable records pertaining to a nonexistent issue?
After telling Marcia Smith of his roadblock with the Vatican Library, she asked if he could help with a team that was lobbying Congressional leader to reinstate funds for the SETI (Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program. Sheehan indicated to Smith that he was glad to help out. Smith also later asked him if he could help out with an investigation into "the potential theological religious implications of potential contact with extraterrestrial civilizations."
This again begs the question that if there's nothing at all to this phenomenon, then why this study?
Sheehan agreed to Smith's request but insisted he have access to the documents pertaining to this issue that she had garnered for an investigation she did for the Science and Technology Committee in Congress. When asked what exactly Sheehan wanted to see, he indicated he wanted access to "the classified sections of the Project Blue Book."
Astoundingly, Daniel was granted access.
He was not allowed to take notes, photos, or carry anything into the room containing the documents or out with him when he left the Library of Congress where the documents were stored. After proceeding through multiple layers of security, he was shown to the room with microfiche machines. Before entering, he was told he could not take his briefcase with him. Almost absent-mindedly, he had a yellow legal pad under his arm that wasn't confiscated before he entered the room. He proceeded through small canisters of film. It didn't take long to find proof.
He discovered photos of what appeared to be a disc-shaped craft. It had crashed.
"It had hit into this field and had dug up, kind of plowed this kind of trough through this field. It was wedged into the side of this bank. There was snow all around |