HealthDay News - Mindfulness Training May Help Arthritis Patients Cope

Small study found those who used it were less tired, stressed

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/news/fullstory_119916.html 

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

 

TUESDAY, Dec. 20 (HealthDay News) -- A small study finds that mindfulness training, which teaches people to push away troublesome thoughts, helped improve well-being in people with rheumatoid arthritis and similar diseases.

Patients in Norway who received the training didn't have less pain compared to those who didn't receive the training, but researchers found they coped better, were less tired and showed less stress.

"Yes, they still have pain, but they are able to manage their pain in more constructive ways," said study author Heidi Zangi, a graduate student at the National Resource Center for Rehabilitation in Rheumatology at Diakonhjemmet Hospital in Oslo.

Mindfulness training teaches people to "stay in the here and now," explained Stefan G. Hofmann, a professor of psychology at Boston University. "It keeps people in the present moment. The instructions are often to focus on breathing or present-moment awareness. As thoughts come into the mind, you just let them come and go without hanging on to them, without focusing on the future, without ruminating about the past."

Mindfulness isn't meditation, but the two are linked, Hofmann said, since "it's impossible to do meditation without doing mindfulness."

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Renee Schoof and Halimah Abdullah - EPA announces historic rule to clean or shut coal-burning power plants

Renee Schoof and Halimah Abdullah | McClatchy Newspapers

December 21, 2011 

WASHINGTON — Unveiling a historic rule, the Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday announced the first national requirement for the nation's coal-fired power plants to reduce emissions of mercury, arsenic, cyanide and other toxic pollutants.

The landmark ruling took more than 20 years for EPA to finish. Under the Clean Air Act, many other sources of air pollution have been cleaned up, but power plants were so important to the economy that they long had a pass.

About 60 percent of the nation's plants, however, already comply with the new requirement because of state rules. The remaining 40 percent are a major source of pollution, producing more than half the mercury emissions in the country, the EPA said. The ruling will require coal-fired power plants to add pollution control equipment or close. Many plants already scheduled to close are 50 years or older.

EPA estimated that the new requirement will prevent as many as 11,000 deaths, 4,700 heart attacks and 130,000 cases of childhood asthma each year.

"This is a great victory for public health, especially for the health of our children," EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said in an announcement ceremony at Children's National Medical Center.

Mercury harms the nervous systems of fetuses and young children, reducing their ability to think and learn as they grow up. Other toxic pollutants from the plants have been linked to cancer and other diseases. Soot, or particle pollution, can cause heart and lung diseases.

"The dirty, soot-spewing coal plant will soon become a relic of the past — a dirty industrial dinosaur," said Frank O'Donnell, president of the watchdog group Clean Air Watch. "Today's action ensures that the cleanup of coal-fired power plants will be the signature clean-air achievement of the Obama administration."

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Rebecca Solnit - Compassion Is Our New Currency

Posted on December 22, 2011, Printed on December 22, 2011

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175483/

 

Notes on 2011’s Preoccupied Hearts and Minds 

By Rebecca Solnit

Usually at year’s end, we’re supposed to look back at events just passed -- and forward, in prediction mode, to the year to come. But just look around you! This moment is so extraordinary that it has hardly registered. People in thousands of communities across the United States and elsewhere are living in public, experimenting with direct democracy, calling things by their true names, and obliging the media and politicians to do the same.

The breadth of this movement is one thing, its depth another. It has rejected not just the particulars of our economic system, but the whole set of moral and emotional assumptions on which it’s based. Take the pair shown in a photograph from Occupy Austin in Texas.  The amiable-looking elderly woman is holding a sign whose computer-printed words say, “Money has stolen our vote.” The older man next to her with the baseball cap is holding a sign handwritten on cardboard that states, “We are our brothers’ keeper.”

The photo of the two of them offers just a peek into a single moment in the remarkable period we’re living through and the astonishing movement that’s drawn in… well, if not 99% of us, then a striking enough percentage: everyone from teen pop superstar Miley Cyrus with her Occupy-homage video to Alaska Yup’ik elder Esther Green ice-fishing and holding a sign that says “Yirqa Kuik” in big letters, with the translation -- “occupy the river” -- in little ones below.

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CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON - Lone holdout's first nuclear winter looms in Tohoku

By CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON

Special to The Japan Times

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/fl20111218x2.html

 

MIHARU VILLAGE, Fukushima Prefecture — As bitter winds blow around cesium and other radioactive particles spewed from the nearby Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant's reactors, Naoto Matsumura lights a cigarette, which he considers relatively good for his health.

"I would get sick if I stopped smoking; I have a lot to worry about," says Matsumura, 52, who reckons he is the only person still living within a 20-km radius of the world's worst atomic disaster since Chernobyl.

According to reports from Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency published in August, following the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, and subsequent explosions at three reactors about 13 km from Matsumura's door, the plant operated by Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) has released 168 times more radiation than the atomic bombs that razed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Living without electricity or enough money to fill his generators with gas, even as the mercury is already dipping below zero, Matsumura wonders if his neighbor's supply of charcoal will be enough to keep him warm through the frigid winter in his corner of the once-thriving town of Tomioka that used to be home to 16,000 people.

He's worried, too, that the hundreds of animals he's been feeding since the area's other residents were evacuated in haste on March 12 — some 400 cows, 60 pigs, 30 fowl, 10 dogs, more than 100 cats, and an ostrich — won't survive to see another spring.

"They need help from humans," he says while lighting another of the 20-odd cigarettes he admits to smoking a day. "My supplies to feed them will be gone by the end of December. They need food, and buildings for shelter from the winter. I'm the only one taking care of everything. The government should do it, but I'm doing it."

As we stand in a rice field outside the exclusion zone about 40 km due west of the ongoing meltdowns, Matsumura tells me that he comes from an ancestral line of samurai, and he was raised by a "spartan" father to work hard and think for himself.

A lifelong farmer, he's lived alone since separating from his wife 10 years ago. When his worried children, aged 23 and 21, called from their homes in distant Saitama Prefecture after the explosions in March, Matsumura says he told them: "Don't worry. If the whole world dies from this nuclear disaster, I'm still not going to die. I'm not going to leave here."

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William Bowles - Empire and the Lies of the Corporate Media -- Are we Living in a Fool's Paradise?

By William Bowles

 

Global Research, December 21, 2011

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28308

Well 2011 has been nothing if not eventful but frankly, in spite of all the #Occupy this and #Occupy that, it's not been a good year for us progresssives or the planet. The Empire acts with increasing, not decreasing impunity, desperate now to try and keep ahead of events lest events take control of it.

Are we living in a fool's paradise?

A question keeps nagging at me: Are all of us, including the left, reacting to an entirely engineered reality, fed to us via an all-embracing media? We get blown this way and that, all of it being determined by whatever 'event' the globalized media decides to feed us with. Then, just as 'mysteriously', the 'event' disappears to be replaced by yet another 'event'.

The old Anarchist cry of 'Do not adjust your mind, there's a fault in reality' takes on an entirely new kind of import given the power of the media to determine what's 'real' for us.

What this means is that the media effectively acts as an agent provocateur for the state and big business as it decides for us what is actually going on in the world. In turn, progressives make decisions based not on what needs to be done, but as a reaction to the 'news' in a weird political version of the Heisenberg Effect.

Press coverage of the Summer Riots is a perfect example of this process in action whereby the media, by focusing solely on the violence and destruction, not only transformed it into a 'riot without a cause' but in doing so actually incited even more violence and destruction, just as ASBOs (Anti-Social Behaviour Orders) are worn as 'badges of honour' by alienated youth who actually go out of their way to get one (or two).

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Greg Palast - Our Photographer - and His Lens - Busted at Occupy

Wednesday 21 December 2011

by: Greg Palast, Truthout | Report

http://www.truth-out.org/our-photographer-and-his-lens-busted-occupy/1324416856

(Photo: Zach D. Roberts)

"So this bishop, three priests and a comedian are locked up together in this paddy wagon and ... "

"Zach! This is NOT funny, and I do NOT want to hear the punch line."

Actually, I appreciate the fact that our team's photojournalist has a sense of humor about getting busted and jailed at Occupy Wall Street.  

But it's not a joke. 

On Saturday, December 17, our man, Zach D. Roberts, along with a bishop of the Episcopalian Church and three ministers of various faiths, plus a stand-up comic, were pushed face-first into the dirt at Duarte Park, handcuffed and hauled off in a police van to the lockup in Lower Manhattan.

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Eliot Spitzer - Our Rallying Cry Should Be, "We Own Wall Street and We Can Stop Corporate America's Worst Behavior."

By Eliot Spitzer, Slate

Printed on December 22, 2011

http://www.alternet.org/story/153535/eliot_spitzer%3A_our_rallying_cry_should_be%2C_%22we_own_wall_street_and_we_can_stop_corporate_america%27s_worst_behavior.%22

 

As the year ends, American politics remains mired in the agenda of the right. The House is, at least momentarily, refusing to extend the payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits—two policies genuinely beneficial to the middle class. And the presidential campaign heading into the Iowa primaries is dominated by the libertarianism of Ron Paul and the astonishing, appalling ideas—eliminate child labor laws, for instance—of Newt Gingrich.

Yes, Occupy Wall Street changed the debate for a brief spell, and, yes, President Obama harkened back to the glory days of progressivism with his Kansas speech. But in general American politics has lost sight of the most important crisis of our generation: the shrinking middle class.

So let me offer some advice to Democrats and progressives seeking to capture the attention of the American people. It has long been my belief that ownership trumps regulation. What I mean by that is while laws and regulations can create boundaries to behavior, the reality, as we have seen after passing much legislation—Sarbanes-Oxley, Dodd-Frank—is that even good laws leave room for bad decision making that results in cataclysm. Even though prosecutors should have charged many more bad actors on Wall Street, much of what led to the crisis was not blatant illegality: It was horrific judgment exercised by senior executives and regulators.

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Global Research - Study: 14,000 U.S. Deaths Tied to Fukushima Reactor Disaster Fallout

Global Research, December 20, 2011

PRNewswire-USNewswire

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28299

Impact Seen As Roughly Comparable to Radiation-Related Deaths After Chernobyl; Infants Are Hardest Hit, With Continuing Research Showing Even Higher Possible Death Count.

WASHINGTON, Dec. 19, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- An estimated 14,000 excess deaths in the United States are linked to the radioactive fallout from the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear reactors in Japan, according to a major new article in the December 2011 edition of the International Journal of Health Services.   This is the first peer-reviewed study published in a medical journal documenting the health hazards of Fukushima.

International Journal of Health Services, Volume 42, Number 1, Pages 47–64, 2012 (based at the Johns Hopkins University, School of Hygiene and Public Health)  [Global Research Editor's Note: IJHS is a prestigious peer reviewed journal.] 

Authors Joseph Mangano and Janette Sherman note that their estimate of 14,000 excess U.S. deaths in the 14 weeks after the Fukushima meltdowns is comparable to the 16,500 excess deaths in the 17 weeks after the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986.  The rise in reported deaths after Fukushima was largest among U.S. infants under age one.  The 2010-2011 increase for infant deaths in the spring was 1.8 percent, compared to a decrease of 8.37 percent in the preceding 14 weeks.

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Bob Chapman - Money Creation and the Bankruptcy of Major Banks: The Roles of the IMF, The European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve

By Bob Chapman

 

Global Research, December 21, 2011

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28311

Debt repayment is a subject few want to discuss, or that few understand. We know most of the largest banks in the world are broke along with at least 6-euro zone nations. There are many others, but the most concerning are the debts of major nations, which are supposedly solvent. Needless to say the US is deeply indebted and the Super-Congress Enabling Committee couldn’t even lay politics aside to cut spending increases.

A bill has been entered into Congress to prohibit US funds being used via the IMF to bail out European banks and governments. We see a scant chance of passage because of the elitist control of both Houses. On the other hand it makes little difference, because the Fed has opened the swap floodgates and other avenues of secret funding to “recapitalize,” bailout, European banks of all sizes and depths of default.

As we end 2011 it is all quiet on the Western Front. Behind the scenes unbeknownst to almost all the elitists are plotting and planning on how to extricate themselves from the morass they have gotten themselves into. How do they put the crisis on the back burner and extend the timeline? The vaunted 6 nations on the edge of default await aid, but one might ask from whom? That solution hasn’t even been sorted out as yet, and we now find France facing a possible two level lowering of debt ratings, but even Germany is not as solvent as they were thought to be. Could it be that France and Germany might not be able to repay their debts? Now you can understand why the money machine, known as the Fed, says nothing about their bailout of Europe. 95% of the population of the world doesn’t even know what a swap is. Even if they did understand they are never going to get the truth from the Fed. We saw that in court and GAO revelations recently.

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Joel Hirschhorn - America's Delusional Democracy. Don’t Mute Newt

By Joel S. Hirschhorn

 

Global Research, December 20, 2011

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28298

 

The trick to maintaining the US delusional democracy is feeding the illusion for citizens that voting and elections really matter.  But when both major parties are owned by rich and corporate elites it matters less than most people think whether Republicans or Democrats win and control Congress or the White House.  Their seeming differences are a clever distraction that keeps fooling and manipulating Americans.  With the help of the mainstream media, making entertainment out of political races, Americans are deceived into thinking that elections deserve their respect and participation. 

 

As power shifts periodically from one party to the other partner of the two-party plutocracy, the illusion of meaningful change sustains the corrupt, dysfunctional political and government system and the economy rewarding the top one percent.  Winning politicians are adept at lying convincingly, especially about change and reforms and, like well advertised products, Americans consume the lies.

 

The perennial problem is that despite what so many Americans view as failed presidencies and, even more clearly, failed Congresses, no Second American Revolution is produced that would return the government to we the people.  The biggest lie of all: Elections can fix the broken system.

 

The candidacy of Newt Gingrich presents a historic opportunity for a new, bigger form of failure that could clarify to most Americans just how broken the electoral system is.  On the one hand, the widespread anti-Obama sentiment coupled with a crippled economy could be sufficient to elect any Republican opponent.  On the other hand, despite a long list of Gingrich deficiencies proclaimed by many mute-Newt conservatives and Republicans, he just might grab the Republican nomination and beat Obama.  Counter intuitively, President Gingrich could help revive American democracy.  He is the failure we have been waiting for, just the right old, fat, loud mouth, hypocritical white guy.

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