Mara Lee - Toll from Weather Disasters in US This Year Hits $52 Billion

Published on Thursday, December 8, 2011 by Hartford Courant

http://www.stltoday.com/news/national/toll-from-weather-disasters-in-u-s-this-year-hits/article_7f03b9cf-30ce-5d4c-9df1-5b86de274a02.html

by Mara Lee

HARTFORD, Conn. - The United States had a dozen weather disasters that caused at least $1 billion in damage this year, the greatest frequency of severe weather that caused costly losses in more than 30 years of federal government tracking.

In this Feb. 2, 2011 file photo, hundreds of cars are seen stranded on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago after a winter blizzard of historic proportions wobbled an otherwise snow-tough Chicago. America's wild weather year has hit yet another new high. (AP) However, even with the number of events, the total losses this year from these storms, flooding and droughts is $52 billion, not even close to the most expensive year on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina alone cost $145 billion in today's dollars. It was the most expensive natural disaster in U.S. history, and, with more than 1,800 deaths, the highest toll in lives since the 1928 hurricane in south Florida.

The Joplin, Mo., tornado was the deadliest single tornado in 61 years, with 160 deaths, and the tornado there, along with 179 others across 15 states in late May cost $9.1 billion, with $6.5 billion in insured losses.

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Matt Apuzzo - Inside Romania's Secret CIA Prison

Published on Thursday, December 8, 2011 by Associated Press

http://www.ajc.com/news/nation-world/ap-exclusive-inside-romanias-1254038.html

by Matt Apuzzo

WASHINGTON — In northern Bucharest, in a busy residential neighborhood minutes from the center of Romania's capital city, is a secret that the Romanian government has tried for years to protect.

For years, the CIA used a government building — codenamed Bright Light — as a makeshift prison for its most valuable detainees. There, it held al-Qaida operatives Khalid Sheik Mohammad, the mastermind of 9/11, and others in a basement prison before they were ultimately transferred to Guantanamo Bay in 2006, according to former U.S. intelligence officials familiar with the location and inner workings of the prison.

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William Astore - Fighting 1% Wars

Posted on December 8, 2011, Printed on December 8, 2011
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175477/

Why Our Wars of Choice May Prove Fatal 
By William J. Astore

America’s wars are remote.  They’re remote from us geographically, remote from us emotionally (unless you’re serving in the military or have a close relative or friend who serves), and remote from our major media outlets, which have given us no compelling narrative about them, except that they’re being fought by “America’s heroes” against foreign terrorists and evil-doers.  They’re even being fought, in significant part, by remote control -- by robotic drones “piloted” by ground-based operators from a secret network of bases located hundreds, if not thousands, of miles from the danger of the battlefield.

Their remoteness, which breeds detachment if not complacency at home, is no accident.  Indeed, it’s a product of the fact that Afghanistan and Iraq were wars of choice, not wars of necessity.  It’s a product of the fact that we’ve chosen to create a “warrior” or “war fighter” caste in this country, which we send with few concerns and fewer qualms to prosecute Washington’s foreign wars of choice.

The results have been predictable, as in predictably bad.  The troops suffer.  Iraqi and Afghan innocents suffer even more.  And yet we don’t suffer, at least not in ways that are easily noticeable, because of that very remoteness.  We’ve chosen -- or let others do the choosing -- to remove ourselves from all the pain and horror of the wars being waged in our name.  And that’s a choice we’ve made at our peril, since a state of permanent remote war has weakened our military, drained our treasury, and eroded our rights and freedoms.

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Jeffrey Clements - The Real History of 'Corporate Personhood': Meet the Man to Blame for Corporations Having More Rights Than You

By Jeffrey Clements, Berrett-Koehler Publishers

Posted on December 6, 2011, Printed on December 8, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/153345/the_real_history_of_%27corporate_personhood%27%3A_meet_the_man_to_blame_for_corporations_having_more_rights_than_you

The following is an excerpt of Jeffrey Clement's Corporations Are Not People: Why They Have More Rights Than You Do and What You Can Do About It.) Click here to order a copy.

In 1971, Lewis Powell, a mild-mannered, courtly, and shrewd corporate lawyer in Richmond, Virginia, soon to be appointed to the United States Supreme Court, wrote a memorandum to his client, the United States Chamber of Commerce. He outlined a critique and a plan that changed America. 

Lewis Powell, like the Citizens United dissenter Justice John Paul Stevens, was a decorated World War II veteran who returned to his hometown to build a most respected corporate law practice. By all accounts, Powell was a gentleman — reserved, polite, and gracious — and a distinguished lawyer and public servant. Commentators and law professors cite Powell’s “qualities of temperament and character” and his “modest” and “restrained” approach to judging. At his funeral in 1998, Sandra Day O’Connor, who had joined the Supreme Court in 1987, said, “For those who seek a model of human kindness, decency, exemplary behavior, and integrity, there will never be a better man.” Even the rare critic will cite Lewis Powell’s decency and kindness. 

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David Schnarch - "Mind-Mapping" -- How We Manipulate the People We Love

By David Schnarch, Psychotherapy Networker

Posted on December 7, 2011, Printed on December 8, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/153358/%22mind-mapping%22%3A_how_we_manipulate_the_people_we_love

Conventional therapeutic wisdom aside, people typically don’t hurt each other because they’re out of touch, unable to communicate, or can’t help themselves. All too frequently, they do hurtful things with impunity and entitlement simply to gratify their own needs. It’s an article of faith among many couples therapists that bad behavior in troubled relationships stems primarily from good intentions gone wrong. They see their clients as frightened children, who may hurt each other, but mean no harm. Followers of attachment theory feel that an underlying “fear of abandonment” drives couples’ conflicts, and the ultimate therapeutic goal is to create a warm, empathic experience, at least partly to make up for what the client missed the first time around.

Thirty years of working with couples and observing the limitations of this attitude has led me to develop an approach not focused on clients’ fears, insecurities, or wounded “inner child,” or on the deficiencies of their early attachments. Instead, it reflects the idea that people typically don’t hurt each other because they’re out of touch, unable to communicate, or can’t help themselves because of their early experiences: they usually know the harm they’re doing, and often it is quite deliberate. Rather than triggered by fear, shame, or insecurity, people do hurtful things with impunity and entitlement to gratify their own needs and wishes. It’s not that they’re “unconsciously recreating their past,” it’s that they’re engaging in the form of relationship with which they’re most familiar, one that, in fact, they prefer.

The key to grasping the roots of this “inner game” is to understand the brain’s ability to map another person’s mind—what I call “mind-mapping,” a process neuroscientists have studied as the Theory of Mind for the past 30 years. Mind-mapping is a survival skill that allows us to predict—and manipulate—other people’s behavior by understanding their thoughts, feelings, and motivations. The ability to mind-map generally emerges at age 4, as children’s brains develop, heralded by the advent of their capacity to tell “fibs.” These cute, clumsy attempts to lie coincide with a child’s realization that a parent’s mind is capable of holding false beliefs, combined with the dawning awareness that what people do depends on what’s in their mind. Mind-mapping reaches adult form around age 11, when children begin to understand adult sexual motivations and complex interpersonal agendas. With the exception of people suffering from conditions like schizophrenia, autism, and some forms of Asperger’s Syndrome, most adults have mind-mapping capabilities; however, therapists may underestimate its role in our relationships.

Marriage is inconceivable without some degree of mind-mapping: you need it to share a life with someone and understand what he or she means, wants, and desires. Of course, it comes in handy if you want to be a good liar, manipulator, or adulterer. You can’t be a successful therapist without it, either! Fully appreciating the subtleties of partners’ ability to mind-map each other can lead to stronger alliances with clients, and faster, more intense, and farther-reaching treatment. But doing this type of therapy means being drawn into depths of human motivation that many therapists prefer to avoid. Consider the following case.

Getting Past the Games

Married for 25 years, Stanley and Kristin, a couple in their early 50s, came to see me for a sexual problem. Throughout their marriage, Stanley had ejaculated shortly after intercourse had begun, but he denied understanding how upset and frustrated Kristin felt about it. Instead, he insisted the bigger problem was Kristin’s affair two years earlier. According to him, Kristin had mentioned her dissatisfaction only a few times during their marriage, and, given that they were having sex twice a week, and that Kristin was frequently orgasmic, he insisted that, as far as he knew, his rapid orgasms were a problem only for him.

When I asked Kristin what she thought, she acknowledged keeping her disappointment to herself all these years because she didn’t want to embarrass Stanley, who’d been reluctant to seek treatment. Nevertheless, sometimes she cried after sex, and occasionally she suggested they have a second go-round.

Upon hearing this, Stanley immediately objected. “Oh come on! You rarely did that! Do you expect me to read your mind?” Kristin acknowledged that she’d rarely proposed this, and Stanley appeared to emerge as the victorious and aggrieved party.

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Robert Scheer - Government-Sponsored Sinner

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/government-sponsored_sinner_20111208/

Posted on Dec 8, 2011

By Robert Scheer

Who would have thought that Republican voters would prove so accepting of sin? At least when its committed by a white guy, like the serial philanderer Newt Gingrich, who betrayed not one but two wives while they were enduring serious medical difficulties.

In the latest New York Times/CBS poll of Iowa Republicans, alleged philanderer Herman Cain’s once impressive support shifts to the new front-runner, Gingrich, whose richer history of marital deceit is not a problem even for the self-described evangelical Christian voters who favor him over Mitt Romney by a ratio of 3-1.

It is the first time that I have felt sympathy for a candidate experiencing the prejudice directed at a practicing Mormon. Clearly the ultimate of “squeaky clean” doesn’t cut it for a presidential contender of that faith among Republican Christian “values voters,” even when he is compared with a sexual roué of Gingrich’s considerable magnitude.

Or perhaps it is Newt’s peerless capacity to mask moral hypocrisy with the appearance of religious propriety, first as a Protestant and now as a Roman Catholic, that endears him to other Republicans who wear their religion on their sleeves. Many of those were willing to tear the country apart over the sexual wanderings of a Democrat in the White House, but now they are quite willing to send someone of Gingrich’s reputation to the Oval Office. We are speaking of a politician who was having an extramarital affair with a congressional staff member 27 years his junior, now more appropriately his third wife, during the very years when he was so energetically stoking the Clinton sex scandal.

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AD McKenzie - In Crisis, The Rich Get Richer

Published on Wednesday, December 7, 2011 by Inter Press Service

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/12/07-1

World Inequality Rises Following Failed Economics

by A.D. McKenzie

PARIS - Mansions on one side of the road, and slums on the other. People queuing for food rations, while others drive by in shiny Land Rovers with tinted windows.

These are just some of the sights that have confronted Danielle Nierenberg as she traveled through 30 countries to supervise the Worldwatch Institute’s report titled ‘State of the World 2011: Innovations that Nourish the Planet’.

"You can see the stark differences within a single country very easily, and you see it every day," she told IPS. "In Africa it doesn’t look like the recession has affected the very wealthy. It has affected poor people the most."

Nierenberg was in Paris this week to launch ‘Comment Nourir 7 Milliards d’Hommes’ (How to Feed 7 Billion People), the French edition of the Washington-based think tank’s report.

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Gail Tverberg - Saudi Arabia - Headed For A Downfall?

By Gail Tverberg

06 December, 2011
ASPO-USA

http://countercurrents.org/tverberg061211.htm

Saudi Arabia recently announced that it had halted a $100 billion oil production expansion plan to raise capacity to 15 million barrels a day by 2020. At this point, the country claims to have capacity of 12 million barrels a day. What does this mean for its future? Let’s take a look behind the figures.

The figure shows that Saudi Arabia has not been increasing its production for many years. At the same time, the country’s oil consumption has been rising rapidly. The combination means that oil exports have already started declining.

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The Washington Independent - U.S. called ‘immoral’ at United Nations climate conference

The Washington Independent 

Wednesday, December 07, 201

As the United Nations climate talks in Durban progress, they are becoming increasingly combative, offering a soft preview of the kind of political atmosphere destined to prevail in a world where agriculture in vulnerable regions of the planet begins to succumb to catastrophic drought and flooding. The United States and Canada have drawn intense criticism here during the first two days of the conference.

Participants lamented Canada’s new status as a “laggard country” when that nation’s conservative government announced its plan to quit the Kyoto Protocol, which it called a thing of the past. And, to almost no one’s surprise, people inside the conference halls and out on the streets joined together in labeling the United States “enemy number one” for the way it is wielding its vast global influence in the service of intransigence, backpedaling and obfuscation. A top South African religious leader Tuesday called the high-profile climate-change skepticism of many U.S. leaders “immoral.”

At a well-attended briefing Tuesday morning held by NGO umbrella organization Climate Action Network, Bishop Geoff Davies, executive director of the Southern African Faith Communities’ Environment Institute, highlighted what he saw as the contradiction inherent in the fact that the people of the United States are deeply religious but also alienated from the responsibility faith demands to address suffering tied to climate-altering pollution.

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Ronald Siegel - West Meets East – Creating a New Wisdom Tradition

Ronald Siegel

Psychotherapy Networker Magazine, December 2011

Twenty-five years ago, when our small group of Boston therapists began meeting to discuss how we might apply ancient Buddhist meditation practices in our work, we didn’t often mention it to our colleagues. Most of us had trained or were working in Harvard Medical School facilities, and the atmosphere there was heavily psychoanalytic. None of us wanted our supervisors or clinical teammates to think of us as having unresolved infantile longings to return to a state of oceanic oneness—Sigmund Freud’s view of the meditation enterprise.

At that time, Buddhist meditation was becoming more popular in America, and intensive meditative retreat centers were multiplying. The new centers often were staffed by Western teachers, many of whom had first encountered meditation in the Peace Corps and later trained in monastic settings in the East. Some of our group had studied in Asia; others had been trained by these newly minted Western teachers. Regardless of our backgrounds, what we shared was that we’d all experienced how radically meditation practices could transform the mind.

Therapists of the day typically viewed meditation as either a fading hippie pursuit or a useful means of relaxation, but of little additional value. Meditation teachers had their own biases toward psychotherapy, typically regarding it as a “lesser practice,” which might prepare someone for meditation but couldn’t really liberate the mind. So those of us who were involved in both domains, and viewed them as complementary, largely kept to ourselves.

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