Hampton Roads Publishing Company Blog

This shouldn’t be (but apparently is) news for scientists. The Scriptures say, “As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.” From http://www.businessweek.com/lifestyle/content/healthday/613899.html?chan=top+news_top+news+index_lifestyle

Meditation Can Wish You Well, Study Says
Imaging tests suggest compassion and empathy can be learned traits

By Amanda Gardner
HealthDay Reporter

THURSDAY, March 27 (HealthDay News) — New research suggests that qualities the world desperately needs more of — love, kindness and compassion — are indeed teachable.

Imaging technology shows that people who practice meditation that focuses on kindness and compassion actually undergo changes in areas of the brain that make them more in tune to what others are feeling.

“Potentially one can train oneself to behave in a way which is more benevolent and altruistic,” said study co-author Antoine Lutz, an associate scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

How far this idea can be extrapolated remains in question, though.

“I think there’s no question that people can benefit from these practices,” said Dr. Louis Teichholz, medical director of complementary medicine and chief of cardiology at Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey. “I think the question is how easy is it to get trained enough so that it will make a clinical difference, and I don’t think this study answers that.”

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John Whitehead is an honest man. Unlike many conservatives who deserted their principles because “one of us” is in the White House, and previously “we” controlled Congress, Whitehead has adhered to first principles. Would that others of the right or left had done the same.

Is it too late? Maybe not, but is certainly isn’t any too early!

Bush and Habeas Corpus: Gutting the Constitution

March 27, 2008
By John W. Whitehead

Incredibly, President Bush would have us believe that the rights of citizenship are only as good as the ground a citizen literally stands on. In recent oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court in a case involving Mohammad Munaf and Shawqi Omar, a Bush Administration lawyer argued that “American citizens, when they go abroad, they have to take what they get.”

Munaf and Omar, both American citizens, were arrested in Iraq by American military personnel and have been in the custody of U.S. authorities operating as part of Multi-National Force Iraq. Both of these Americans are challenging attempts by the Bush Administration to deny them access to U.S. courts and transfer them into Iraqi custody, where they could very well be subjected to torture and given the death penalty.

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Hard to tell from this distance, but this seems a remarkable development. One has to admire the courage of the scholars involved here. From http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/24/world/asia/24china.html?hp

Scholars Urge Dialogue With Dalai Lama

By HOWARD W. FRENCH

SHANGHAI, March 23 — A group of prominent Chinese intellectuals has circulated a petition urging the government to stop what it has called a “one-sided” propaganda campaign and initiate direct dialogue with the Dalai Lama.

The petition, which was signed by more than two dozen writers, journalists and scholars contains 12 recommendations which, taken together, represent a sharp break from the Chinese government’s response to the wave of demonstration that have swept Tibetan areas of the country in recent days.

They come, moreover, at a time when the government is working hard to convey a sense of strong international support for putting down what is being depicted here as a civil disturbance by lawless people being instigated by the Tibet’s spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, who Beijing denounces as a secessionist, or “splittist.”

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Perhaps you are one of those people who think that economics is either dull or impentrable. Sometimes it is, mostly it is a matter of finding someone willing to explain things in English. Of course, then you have to decide for yourself if the explanation is actually based in reality, or if it leaves out huge significant facts…. This is long but if you’re willing to work at it you can learn something.

From the Economist, http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10881318

What went wrong

Mar 19th 2008

From The Economist print edition

In our special briefing, we look at how near Wall Street came to systemic collapse this week—and how the financial system will change as a result. We start with how financiers—and their critics—have laboured under a delusion

“A COMPANY for carrying out an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is.” This lure for the South Sea Company, published in 1720, has a whiff of the 21st century about it. Modern finance has promised miracles, seduced the brilliant and the greedy—and wrought destruction. Alan Greenspan, formerly chairman of the Federal Reserve, said in 2005 that “increasingly complex financial instruments have contributed to the development of a far more flexible, efficient, and hence resilient financial system than the one that existed just a quarter-century ago.” Tell that to Bear Stearns, Wall Street’s fifth-largest investment bank, the most spectacular corporate casualty so far of the credit crisis.

For the critics of modern finance, Bear’s swift end on March 16th was the inevitable consequence of the laissez-faire philosophy that allowed financial services to innovate and spread almost unchecked. This has created a complex, interdependent system prone to conflicts of interest. Fraud has been rampant in the sale of subprime mortgages. Spurred by pay that was geared to short-term gains, bankers and fund managers stand accused of pocketing bonuses with no thought for the longer-term consequences of what they were doing. Their gambling has been fed by the knowledge that, if disaster struck, someone else—borrowers, investors, taxpayers—would end up bearing at least some of the losses.

Since the era of frock coats and buckled shoes, finance has been knocked back by booms and busts every ten years or so. But the past decade has been plagued by them. It has been pocked by the Asian crisis, the debacle at Long-Term Capital Management, a super-brainy hedge fund, the dotcom crash and now what you might call the first crisis of securitisation. If the critics are right and something in finance is broken, then there will be pressure to reregulate, to return to what Alistair Darling, Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer, calls “good old-fashioned banking”. But are the critics right? What really went wrong with finance? And how can it be fixed?

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A logical continuation of yesterday’s blog entry by John Whitehead.

The Chinese record on Tibet is sickening, and has been since the initial invasion of 1950. But what’s more sickening is the willing complicity of those who rule us (legally and illegally, with or without our consent). And now that they have pretty well destroyed our economy and our dollar, they probably don’t dare say too much to the Chinese even if they wish to, because the one who pays the piper still chooses the tune, regardless of whatever pretense is universally agreed to.

From the online San Francisco Chronicle, SFGate: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/g/a/2008/03/21/notes032108.DTL

Friday, March 21, 2008 (SF Gate)
Note to China: Please Implode

Could the Olympics rain down shame on Chinese oppression and Tibet abuses? Let’s hope

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

I hope it all comes crashing down on their heads.

Is that wrong? Is it ill-minded and somehow unfair to wish that the
Chinese government’s notorious record of human rights abuses and
absolutely horrid treatment of Tibet be exposed to the world–and
the Chinese people themselves–to the point where it is shamed and
humiliated and perhaps even forced by unprecedented international scrutiny
to upheave its oppressive ways and improve conditions and even (heaven
forfend) honor religious and political freedom within its borders? No, I
do not think it is.

Let me admit outright: I am no expert on Chinese-Tibetan relations. I do
not know the full histories, the deeper conflicts, the enormous
prejudices, the religious oppression that goes back decades and
generations.

But I do know something of Tibet, of the Dalai Lama, of his unadorned
messages of peace and love. And I know something of Tibetan Buddhism, of
China’s abduction of the true Panchen Lama, of the brutal oppression and
the massacres and the cultural genocide, the forced relocation of Han
Chinese into Tibetan holy land, of the Tibetan’s peaceful rallies and
chanting and nonviolence, all contrasted with images of jackbooted Chinese
riot police stomping on the heads of protesters marching in the street.

And I know whom I tend to believe when I read “unconfirmed” reports of
soldiers firing on Tibetan protesters, of dead bodies in the streets of
Lhasa, of tanks rolling through crowds and hundreds of students arrested,
Tibetan monasteries being locked down and Tibet again under martial law,
all media cut off, all access denied, as sour and rather vile hardline
Communist leader Zhang Qingli steps up to a microphone and calls the Dalai
Lama — perhaps the gentlest, kindest human soul on the face of the
planet — a “wolf in monk’s robes, a devil with a human face but the
heart of a beast.” Yes, I think I know where the truth lies.

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Money Takes the Gold at the Beijing Olympics

March 21, 2008
By John W. Whitehead

“If freedom-loving people throughout the world do not speak out against Chinese oppression and China and Tibet, we have lost all moral authority to speak on behalf of human rights anywhere in the world.”— Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)

There was a time when the Olympic Games embodied all that was noble and worthy about sports competition: the sense of fair play, the good-natured competition, the idea that hard work and determination paid off in the end, the triumph over adversity.

Who could forget African American track and field runner Jesse Owens flying in the face of Hitler’s claim of Aryan supremacy to win four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics? Or Wilma Rudolph overcoming a lifetime of childhood diseases, including polio, to win three gold medals at the 1960 Olympics? Or Abebe Bikila of Ethiopia running the fastest marathon ever, all the while wearing no shoes? Or Nadia Comaneci’s perfect 10 in gymnastics?

These triumphs and what they stand for have been largely overshadowed in recent years by the rampant greed that has turned the Olympic Games into a money-making enterprise. The upcoming Games in China are no different. Corporations have already spent millions of consumer dollars to be named sponsors of the Beijing Olympics. They include some of the best-known brands in the world: Adidas, Anheuser-Busch, Coca-Cola, General Electric (parent of NBC), Johnson & Johnson, Kodak, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Panasonic, Samsung, Staples, Swatch, UPS, Visa and Volkswagen, to name just a few.

What’s become even more troubling for many human rights activists, however, is the extent to which corporations and governments, loath to rile China and upset the proverbial moneycart, have turned a blind eye to the rising superpower’s human rights abuses and its support of the genocidal regime in Sudan.

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Fiona Hanson / Associated Press

Science fiction writer Sir Arthur C. Clarke, best known for “2001: A Space Odyssey,” was a prolific and best-selling author for four decades with an uncanny ability to predict the impact of technology.

If the work of Arthur C. Clarke meant to you anything as much as what it meant to me, I suggest that you google “Arthur C. Clarke” for a sample of the obituary material available. This particular article is from the San Francisco Chronicle http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/03/19/MNO8VMABN.DTL

Futurist writer Arthur C. Clarke, 90, dies

Gerald Jonas, New York Times

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Arthur C. Clarke, a writer whose seamless blend of scientific expertise and poetic imagination helped usher in the space age, died Wednesday in his adopted home of Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he had lived since 1956. He was 90.

The author of almost 100 books, Clarke was an ardent promoter of the idea that humanity’s destiny lay beyond the confines of Earth. It was a vision served most vividly by “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the classic 1968 science-fiction film he created with the director Stanley Kubrick and the novel of the same title that he wrote as part of the project.

His work was also prophetic: His detailed forecast of telecommunications satellites in 1945 came more than a decade before the first orbital rocket flight.

Clarke’s influence on public attitudes toward space was acknowledged by American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts, by scientists like Carl Sagan and by movie and television producers. Gene Roddenberry credited Clarke’s writings with encouraging him to pursue his “Star Trek” project in the face of indifference from television executives.

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No doubt someone will explain what these photos show, but regardless they’re beautiful. From http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/technology/technology.html?in_article_id=536928&in_page_id=1965

Mystery surrounds strange marbled markings spotted in iceberg off the Antarctic

A Norwegian sailor has discovered strange marbled markings in an iceberg off the Antarctic.

Oyvind Tangen was aboard a research vessel when he noticed the unusual black lines striped through the ice block.

Tangen, 62, grabbed his camera to take these remarkable photographs of the piece so it could be investigated.

The Antartic: Norwegian sailor Oyvind Tangen was aboard a research vessel when he noticed the unusual black lines striped through the ice block

He said: “It reminds me of striped candy I bought as a child.

“The iceberg was about 50 metres long and nine metres high.”

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Kids Today Don’t Stand a Chance

March 13, 2008
By John W. Whitehead

On March 11, 2008, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released the results of a study which found that nearly 26% (1 in 4) of American teenage girls ages 14-19 have at least one sexually transmitted disease. This report and its ramifications, however, were quickly shelved so that the media could provide us with non-stop coverage of the New York governor’s sexcapades with a prostitute.

As titillating as the Spitzer scandal might seem, its impact is fleeting when compared to the fact that approximately 3.2 million young women in the United States are estimated to be infected with a wide range of sexually transmitted diseases. Of the 838 teen girls surveyed, approximately 50% admitted to being sexually active. Of this 50%, an overwhelming 40% tested positive for a sexually transmitted disease.

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This is sort of old news to me, but will be new to many. In the book I wrote (but haven’t yet published) about the use of visualization to improve health, I pointed out that the placebo effect should be called the miracle effect. As this article from Newsweek, via a friend, demonstrates.

Placebo Nation: Just Believe

It’s not that medicines are ‘crummy,’ but that placebos are so powerful. It’s time scientists learned why.

Sharon Begley

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 12:22 PM ET Mar 8, 2008

When you write about science, there is no shortage of topics that incite the wrath of readers. Climate change. Evolution. Racial differences in IQ. But say that dummy pills with no pharmacologically active ingredients—placebos—are about as effective as antidepressants in treating depression, and watch out. People are incensed at the very thought that the (often expensive) meds they rely on might be 21st-century versions of the magic feather that Dumbo, the flying elephant, was told would make him airborne. It was only when Dumbo dropped the feather he was clutching in his trunk while in free fall, and started flapping his ears, that he grasped that his powers actually came from within, allowing him to fly.

No one is saying “positive thinking” can cure cancer, or that patients should throw out their pills, let alone that illnesses that respond to the placebo effect are “all in your head”—imagined. But there is no denying the drumbeat of studies on the therapeutic power of placebos. Over the years they have been shown to relieve asthma, lower blood pressure, reduce angina and stop gastric reflux. An inert solution injected into the brains of patients with Parkinson’s disease reduced muscle rigidity about as well as standard drugs. In a bizarre finding, sham surgery of the knee, in which patients got sedation and an incision but no actual procedure, relieved the pain of osteoarthritis better than actual arthroscopy—and produced an equal improvement in joint function, scientists reported in 2002. And last month an analysis of clinical trials of a range of antidepressants found that, except in the most severe cases, placebos lifted the black cloud as well as meds did.

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