Implement Sleep-Right Rules

Once you’ve turned your bedroom into a healthy, sleep-inducing oasis, the next critical step is to start sleeping correctly. You may not have known that there is actually a proper way and time to sleep. It’s true!

When, how and how much we sleep is important. Failing to follow these recommendations can impede the fat-burning and hormone-balancing benefits you should gain from sleep each and every night.

Here are The Clear Medicine System guidelines for hormone-enhancing sleep:

Sleep in complete darkness. Again, even a small amount of light can hamper your sleep.

Sleep nude (or at least with loose-fitting nightclothes – but nude is better). Do not sleep in tight undergarments (bras, girdles, briefs, etc). Tight clothing will increase your body temperature and interfere with melatonin release while you sleep.

Establish regular sleeping hours. Try to get up each morning and go to bed every night at roughly the same time. Oversleeping can be as detrimental as sleep deprivation. How you feel each day is an important indication of how much sleep is right for you.

Get to bed by 11 p.m. Since the invention of electricity (not to mention television and computers), we have begun staying up later and later. This change has resulted in a largely sleep-deprived society. Our stress glands, the adrenals, recharge or recover most between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m. Going to bed before 11 p.m. (in fact, 10 p.m. is even better) is optimal for rebuilding your adrenal reserves. I know this can be difficult to change so I recommend to my patients they start going to bed 15 minutes earlier each week until they reach their new target time.

Sleep 7 ½ to 9 hours a night. The American Cancer Association has found higher incidences of cancer in individuals who consistently sleep less than six hours or more than nine hours nightly. Oversleeping is just as harmful as sleep deprivation. Consistently needing more than nine hours of sleep every night warrants a visit to your doctor for further investigation, as this may indicate an underlying medical condition such as hypothyroidism or depression or a deficiency of iron, folic acid or vitamin B12. Some of us simply require more or less sleep than others. If you awaken without an alarm and feel rested, you’re likely getting the right amount of sleep for you.

See the light first thing in the morning. Daylight and morning sounds are key signals that help awaken your brain. Turning on the lights or opening the blinds is the proper way to reset your body clock and ensure that your melatonin levels drops back to “awake” mode until the evening. Exposure to morning light has also been proven to be one of the simplest ways to increase your energy for the entire day. It’s also been shown to boost testosterone in men and fertility in women by stimulating luteinizing hormone release from the pituitary gland. Enhance this action further by exposing yourself to sunlight and by getting outside during the day. I can’t say enough about the benefits of getting outside, even for 10–20 minutes in the morning light.

Keep household lighting dim from dinnertime until you go to sleep. Believe it or not, this simple step not only prepares your body and hormones for sleep, but it also helps your digestion.

The most important step in selecting a natural sleep aid is to first determine the cause of your sleep disruption because different supplements can be more effective than others for specific sleep-robbing conditions. Difficulty falling or staying asleep may result from stress, vitamin or mineral deficiency, excess caffeine intake, certain medications, menopause, anxiety, depression, low melatonin, muscle tension, pain and a whole host of other reasons too numerous to list. Fortunately, many herbal remedies, vitamins, minerals, amino acids and hormones are available to assist you in your quest for a good night’s rest.

Magnesium or calcium/magnesium is recommended for all causes of sleep disruption – in addition to one or more of the following for the specific sleep imbalances:

Cant fall asleep – Suggested Supplement / Remedy – usually due to high cortisol/stress:
Seditol – 3 at bedtime with magnesium 200 to 800 mg
Relora – 1 on rising and 2 before bed
Ashwaganda – 500 to 1,000 mg twice daily

Can’t stay asleep – Suggested Supplement / Remedy – usually due to high cortisol/stress or low melatonin
Relora – 1 on rising and 2 before bed
Ashwaganda – 500 to 1,000 mg twice daily
Melatonin – sublingual form is best 3 mg – best for those over 45 to 50 years

Waking too early– Suggested Supplement / Remedy – usually due to low serotonin/anxiety or depression
RX to increase serotonin – fish oils – 6 grams per day
Vitamin D3 2000 to 5000IU per day
5 HTP 200 to 400 mg per day and add Cenitol (metagenics), which is inositol, to protein shakes daily to enhance serotonin in the brain

Racing mind in bed at night– Suggested Supplement / Remedy – usually due to high cortisol
Phosphatidylserine – 300mg at bedtime
Vitamin B6 -100mg at bedtime

Can’t sleep because of anxiety or body tension/pain– Suggested Supplement / Remedy – usually due to low GABA, a naturally calming brain chemical
Gaba – 500 to 1000mg at bedtime

Can’t sleep due to PMS – Suggested Supplement / Remedy – usually due to low progesterone which helps to prevent headaches, anxiety and insomnia before your period
Evening primrose oil – 2000mg daily for 2 weeks prior to menses
Natural progesterone cream – prescription through MD or ND

Can’t sleep due to Menopausal or Perimenopausal symptoms- Suggested Supplement / Remedy – usually due to low progesterone/low estrogen and/or high cortisol, which can cause hot flashes, night sweats, anxiety, palpitations, broken sleep

Suggestions for progesterone above
Herbs to increase estrogen – clear estrogen 2 to 3 at bedtime
Natural Bi-est cream – prescription through your MD or ND
Relora – 1 on rising and 2 before bed to reduce stress at menopause

Normally a lot of these shows are filled with drivel — but this one is worth reposting — and worth watching if you can deal with the product placements. It’s remarkable in that it is so through and so free of the usual bandaid solutions.

Last week, on an internet radio channel called The Fifth Column, I debated climate change with Claire Fox of the Institute of Ideas, one of the rightwing libertarian groups that rose from the ashes of the Revolutionary Communist party. Fox is a feared interrogator on the BBC show The Moral Maze. Yet when I asked her a simple question – “do you accept that some people’s freedoms intrude upon other people’s freedoms?” – I saw an ideology shatter like a windscreen. I used the example of a Romanian lead-smelting plant I had visited in 2000, whose freedom to pollute is shortening the lives of its neighbours. Surely the plant should be regulated in order to enhance the negative freedoms – freedom from pollution, freedom from poisoning – of its neighbours? She tried several times to answer it, but nothing coherent emerged which would not send her crashing through the mirror of her philosophy.

He’s right – but he’s missing a key point: The libertarian movement has rightly seized on one of the fundamental tenants of the doctrine of freedom taught by Paul: For freedom to be freedom, freedom must be absolute.

But, they miss the foundational logic behind such. The entirety of Scripture is pretty clear on one key point: people with un-transformed hearts need the law. They need to be controlled and they need a system of punishment to back such or other people would be harmed.

The intention of other people not being harmed has never changed.

All that has changed is the mechanism of the delivery of such. It’s based on the foundational assumption that people’s hearts can be changed and that every other part of them can be made new – such that they want new things. It’s based on the belief that it is possible to have such a profound encounter with love in the form of the person of Christ that the human heart can come to feel the pain of others and care as deeply for the pain of another as if it were their own pain. It’s based on the assumption that a person can come to hear the voice of God and, indeed, can come to long to do so.

A person who is that deeply transformed can be set absolutely free for they no longer need the control of law to cease hurting and commence loving others.

Libertarian ideology ignores once simple reality: Not all hearts have been transformed.

They could be – but some don’t want to be, some are too damaged to understand how to be, some are too afraid to be and some are so deluded that they actually think the evil that defines their lives IS transformation.

Those people need the law that the adherents of this level of extremism want to and have largely succeeded in abolishing.

Ironic thing is, it’s predominantly Christians who are promoting the ideological delusion that setting people free with un-transformed hearts is consistent with the Gospel…

On the other hand you have something PG calls the maker’s schedule – a schedule for those of us who produce stuff. Working on large abstract systems involves fitting the whole thing into your mind – somebody once likened this to constructing a house out of expensive crystal glassand as soon as someone distracts you, it all comes barreling down and shatters into a thousand pieces.

Finally, an explanation!

The students could not go from their vague discomfort to a rational ethical conclusion because they have never learned traditional philosophy of ethics. Therefore, their objections have no force and, for all that they sense injustice, they will likely do very little good in the world. And the “accept everyone, accept everything” assemblies they attend unwittingly feed the problem: They learn to accept gay rights in North America and stoning gays in Afghanistan.

For centuries, the Church (Protestant and Catholic) was the center of moral thought. She defined goodness, ethics, morality and truth and, as dubious as some of the definitions may have been, they were societally accepted – though they were founded on very little in the way of rational thought and mostly based on the writings of ancient teachers.

And, the years passed and the faith slowly changed. More and more the basic concepts of grace and freedom became a tired footnote to a reconstituted law we used to control people. The strident hostility she formerly displayed towards the Gnostic ideas that regarded the body as bad and the spirit as good were replaced by a bland acceptance of such. The ancient and even enlightenment ideals of God calling humanity to heal and change the world for good slowly became replaced with a cosmic vending machine of the Divine which is purchased by an ever changing subset of moral requirements.

And, society responded. The more educated did what the Church had long since ceased to do – read the Bible – and rejected us because the strange Judaism, Gnosticism and New Age Movement based beliefs we were now following in no way resembled the teachings of Scripture. The less educated simply looked at us in the hard cold light of reality and judged us to be idiotic. And, they were both right.

And, with us went our morality.

But, the Church had no fear. Our laws safely projected our moral system and a societal acceptance of virtue – thus, the acceptance of our morality was not really that necessary. So, we continued with our passivity, pulled back into our stained glass hidey-holes, repeated the writings of long dead thinkers and acted like everything was fine while we continued to do nothing to alter our refusal to actually think about what we believe.

But, little by little, something was changing. While our laws still promoted most virtues, the society quietly forgot truth could even exist – and the law started to seem silly. And, a Church promoting anyone’s law – especially long dead people’s laws – began to seem absurdist, and MOST WORTHY of strident censure themselves.

So, then we finally get here: We arrive at a place where a class full of high school students no longer can look at a culture where women are property, can be executed at will, have their noses hacked off and may be abused by their husbands or families as a matter of course and conclude that this is not a good thing to be happening.

Why? Because way back when, we decided it was a good idea to stop thinking. We decided we would base our teachings on dead guy’s thinkings instead of founding them on anthropology (The study of what it means to be human) and we decided our stained glass hideouts would attract people in all by themselves.

And, ultimately, we decided to quit engaging culture and thought.

The ironic reality is that when we quit engaging and thinking, even secular thinkers are waking up and realizing that thinking basically seems to have ceased – right along with the ability to stand up for much other then not standing up for much of anything other then seals and trees – especially that which may suggest that some things simply do not fit well with our Anthropology.

And, starkly and significantly absent from an article that so clearly grasps the problem, is even the remotest grasp of anything but a plan to go back to teaching a set of rules that these students should then accept and make moral judgments on the basis of.

And, we’re still waiting for the Church to stand up…

We expect to carry on our lawful lives free from police intrusion unless a judge can be persuaded that the police are justified in their intrusion into your life, including the fact that the intrusion relates to a lawful investigation into criminal wrongdoing. Lawful access would remove the only check and balance, allowing police the ability monitor citizens without any reason.

Just in case you thought plans for a police state here in Canuckistan have finally died their natural death, think again…

It’s back, it hasn’t changed much and it still has exactly the same goal: the removal of the only firewall we have to modify the behavior of those we have given the power of life and death, bondage and freedom and rights vs. responsibilities.

And, it still needs more voices speaking out against it.

For example, subjects were asked if they’d administer harmless but painful electric shocks to another person. They chose to shock those fully clothed significantly more often than those exposed above the waist. So if you’re looking for sympathy, maybe show a little skin.

After years of church and society ranting about how a woman showing a little skin is the woman dressing for a rape, it turns out the opposite is true. Men and women who show a little skin actually elicit sympathy, not predation, from others.

Doesn’t it also seem rather interesting that the schools which treat children in the most severe ways also tend to be those which have the most stringent uniform demands…

The organizers of Occupy Wall Street are fighting to upend the system. But what gives their movement the potential for power and potency is the masses who just want the system to work the way they were promised it would work. It’s not that 99 percent of Americans are really struggling. It’s not that 99 percent of Americans want a revolution. It’s that 99 percent of Americans sense that the fundamental bargain of our economy — work hard, play by the rules, get ahead — has been broken, and they want to see it restored.

It’s becoming increasingly apparent that the news media, almost to a journalist, simply fails to grasp what is going on world wide as the protests in the world wide financial centers multiply and the frenzied rhetoric calling for the arrests of the protestors out of the financial leaders increases in pitch and volume. They write curious articles wondering who these people are, what they want and about how silly they are to be there.

Strangely, the financial leadership is NOT giving voice to the same wonderment. They already know.

What they know is this: when the people of Egypt came to understand that they had a two tiered court system, that they had been fleeced out of their money, that they were under surveillance and control, that they were living in fear, that normal means would not get the job done and that they needed a change in those who were ruling over them, they went to the seat of power and overthrew those leaders. (Sadly they failed to figure out what they would replace it with…)

Well, the rest of the world has too figured out that they have a two tiered court system, that we have been fleeced out of our money, that we are under surveillance and control, that we are increasingly living in fear, that normal means will not get the job done as our political critters are all on the take and that we need a change in those who are ruling over them, they went to the real seat of western power and are clearly working to overthrow the real unelected overlords of our society. (Sadly they also have failed to figure out what they would replace them with…)

But, make no mistake, the loudest protests are not coming from the guys on the mattresses in the park out front – they are coming from the 33rd floor of the building because, unlike the press, they get it. They get that their paid shills in Congress, the Senate and on the North Side of the 49th may have to finally grow a spine and admit that the sort of theft these uber-rich managed to get written into law is just wrong. Perhaps, they may even have to do something about it – hopefully by tossing these thieves in jail.

Let’s just hope they all figure out how to spell, “Wrong,” before, as in Egypt, our overlords are dragged in the street.

So what’s keeping kids indoors? Fear of abduction is a big one, followed by worries about kids getting hit by cars and bullies, surveys have found.



Those fears have created legions of overprotective parents rearing “wimps” who are unable to cope with the ups and downs of life because they have no experience doing so, said Hara Estroff Marano, the New York-based author of the book A Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting.



“The home of the brave has given way to the home of the fearful, the entitled, the risk averse, and the narcissistic,” Marano said. “Today’s young, at least in the middle class and upper class, are psychologically fragile,” Marano said in an interview published in the journal.



Hovering parents, these researchers said, also deprive their children of something else — joy. One survey found that 89 percent of children preferred outdoor play with friends to watching TV.



“Parents have to remember that childhood is this special time. You only get it once, and you don’t want to miss it,” LaFreniere said. “Mixing it up with other kids in an unrestrained manner isn’t just fun. It isn’t a luxury. It’s part of nature’s plan.”

Apparently, there’s something rather positive to be said for mediocre parenting…

With all the helicopter parenting, early childhood education, language immersion and other tactics we are all so sure will help our kid to get ahead, we’ve forgotten how to raise humans who know how to get along. Perhaps we finally have an explanation for the American political system…

There are both plant and animal sources for omega-3 fats, and there are differences between them. All have different ratios of three important omega-3 fatty acids—ALA, EPA and DHA. DHA is the most important for your brain. EPA is also required by your brain, but in smaller amounts.



Plant-based omega-3 sources like flax, hemp and chia seeds are high in ALA, but low in EPA and DHA. Although ALA is an essential nutrient, the key point to remember is that the conversion of ALA to the far more essential EPA and DHA is typically quite inhibited by impaired delta 6 desaturase, an enzyme necessary for you to convert the ALA into the longer chain EPA and DHA. Because of this, it is important to include animal-based sources of omega-3 fats, such as krill oil, in your diet, and this supplement regimen would likely be incredibly useful for those in the military, as it is for the majority of Americans.

There is just a stunning amount of information coming out about the effectiveness of these oils – information that is more then just a little contested by the vegetarian sector that is pushing flax oil and the like. Problem is, the flax oils are not generating the decrease in inflammatory response that most are taking these oils for. Here’s why.

StopSpying.ca

This is probably the second most offensive plan Ottawa has set in motion – and they need to hear your voice. Like, a in, yesterday!

That too is my view: that the GOP, deep down, is behaving as a religious movement, not as a political party, and a radical religious movement at that. Lofgren sees the “Prosperity Gospel” as a divine blessing for personal enrichment and minimal taxation (yes, that kind of Gospel is compatible with Rand, just not compatible with the actual Gospels); for military power (with a major emphasis on the punitive, interventionist God of the Old Testament); and for radical change and contempt for existing institutions (as a product of End-Times thinking, intensified after 9/11).

That’s how I explain the current GOP. It can only think in doctrines, because the alternative is living in a complicated, global, modern world they both do not understand and also despise. Taxes are therefore always bad. Government is never good. Foreign enemies must be pre-emptively attacked. Islam is not a religion. Climate change is an elite conspiracy to impoverish America. Terror suspects are terrorists. When Americans torture, it is not torture. When Christians murder, they are not Christians. And if you change your mind on any of these issues, you are a liberal, an apostate, and will be attacked.

Religion has replaced all of this, reordered it, and imbued the entire political-economic-religious package with zeal. And the zealous never compromise. They don’t even listen. Think of Michele Bachmann’s wide-eyed, Stepford stare as she waits for a questioner to finish before providing another pre-cooked doctrinal nugget. My fear – and it has building for a decade and a half, because I’ve seen this movement up-close from within and also on the front lines of the marriage wars – is that once one party becomes a church with unchangeable doctrines, and once it has supplanted respect for institutions and civility with the radical pursuit of timeless doctrines and hatred of governing institutions, then our democracy is in grave danger.

Ok, just for a min, ignore that Richard Dawkins is all over this like ugly on an ape. Ignore Sullivan himself and his attitudes as well. Just think about the message…

He’s right.

I spent my early childhood years mostly on the dark continent watching every imaginable form of political chaos and genocide take place. And I learned something: Democracy will not work everywhere. Democracy will only work where a population places greater allegiance in concepts like the rule of law, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, humanist care for the common good, reason, logic and all of the above are elevated over concepts like family and religion or ideology.

When a political party cheers for the death of a sick or foolish person who is ill because it fits their ideology, we’re already there.

Even if the death penalty were morally legitimate (and I think it isn’t), and even if we could be justifiably confident that every one of those 234 executed prisoners was actually guilty of the crimes for which they were sentenced (and I think we can’t), it would still be grotesque to react to those executions with cheers and applause, as the audience did at this week’s Republican debate. Surely a mood of solemnity and regret would be more appropriate. These Republicans howling and hooting over executions are the kind who formerly reveled in seeing Christians thrown to the lions. The fact that they now have the effrontery to call themselves Christians only adds insult to injury (literally).

There are some videos that are so stark, some messages so telling and some heart attitudes so chillingly cold they tell their own story to any who has eyes to see such that no other comment is necessary.

CPS involvement did not improve long-run outcomes, a 2010 study found. Such involvement sometimes harms children by taking them from their families unnecessarily – which, in my office’s experience, happens more than 100 times each year in the District. These removals traumatize children and devastate families.

I wish I could disagree with the study, but, while I have always followed the code drilled into me at least once every month of my training and constantly by every brief of the laws I am under, about 2/3rds of the time, I ended up wishing I had not. Most of the time, it’s like watching an episode of some sort of absurdist sitcom entitled, “The invasion of the mental munchkins.”

The same is true when adults report rapes etc. It’s been my experience that less then 2-3% of the offenders ever see a night in jail – while the victims get to experience a system that pretty much torments them for months and leaves them tormenting themselves long after. I’d say that the majority of the PTSD symptoms that later emerge are not the result of the rape but, rather, the result of police and social services stupidity.

As sad as it is to say, it’s getting so therapists need to issue guidelines for reporting to them…

Just a few of the things that are never taught in the ivory castles of education by those who epitomize the statement that, “Those who can, do, the rest teach,” to say nothing of even being remotely grasped by the legal system…

In a chapter titled "The Sun Will Save Your Life," you discuss the possible connection between autism and vitamin D deficiency. I was wondering if you could expand on that a little.

This is a fairly new study. There were two articles, one in Scientific American and the other in a Swedish journal, that presented compelling evidence that low vitamin D levels in pregnant mothers can be one of the triggers for this heartbreaking affliction. Unfortunately, a lot of autism groups still blame vaccinations even though this explanation really isn’t being borne out scientifically.

In what ways is the public misinformed about the dangers of sun exposure and how did we go astray?

Dr. John Canell, whom I interviewed for the book and is a council member for a nonprofit group of physicians studying the health effects of vitamin D, argues that we’re the first [modern] generation of cave people. Nature intended for man to take in a lot of sunlight. For proof, one need look no further than the statistic revealing that 10-15 minutes of sunbathing will provide us with the same amount of vitamin D as 200 glasses of milk. And this vitamin is one of our most potent anti-cancer agents. I think we started running into trouble when we shifted away from an outdoor, agricultural society to an indoor, manufacturing one.

The second blow was the invention of the air conditioner, which insured that everyone kept his or her windows closed. Window glass completely blocks out the ultraviolet rays that enable our bodies to manufacture vitamin D. Unfortunately for kids, I think the final straw has been the computer and video-game craze of the last 30 years. Unlike past generations, children today spend a lot more time indoors than they do playing around in the sun. Testing shows that our vitamin D levels are now a small fraction of what we think they were 100 years ago. These kinds of tests weren’t administered back then, so there’s no way for us to know for sure.

So does this mean the cast of "The Jersey Shore" is less likely to develop melanoma?

Ultimately, everybody knows how much sun they can safely take in. You really should try not to burn, especially if you have blue eyes, fair skin and red or blond hair. Melanoma claims approximately 9,000 lives in the U.S. per year, which is worrisome, but it’s also worth noting that upward of 250,000 lives could be saved from cancer-related illnesses if people had the proper amount of vitamin D in their bloodstreams. It’s better to get too much sun than too little.

Finally, real researchers are starting to stand up against the sunscreen fearmongering. And, the numbers are stark: Keeping the sun off your skin may prevent easily seen and removed skin cancer, but it makes you 27X more likely to enjoy organ cancer you can’t easily see or cut off.

Nice…

Laws are not made because they are righteous. Laws are made because they advance somebody’s political career.

(It should be noted that these are words that don’t come from a rock-throwing masked guy, but from a professional politician in suit and tie.)

And this one:

I sometimes hear people claim that laws exist to be followed. These people are the most dangerous people who exist in a society. Tyranny is never upheld through law; it is upheld through thousands of bureaucrats that follow the letter of the law just because they believe in rules and law.

And then this one as well:

A society where people regard rules as general guidelines is a lot healthier for its neighbors and citizens alike than a society where laws and rules are enforced blindly and swiftly.

A little embarrassing that the Pirate Party seems to have a greater grasp of the – yes, pre-cross no less – teachings of Jesus then the church and the two North American nations that purportedly follow such…

Compliments of the inestimable wisdom of Bill Maher… Yes, he’s his usual profane self, he completely fails to grasp what Jesus was up to with The Sermon on the Mount and, he is still so very worth listening to.

Rather interesting that you can get a better grasp of the heart of Jesus out of an avowed pothead and atheist then you can out of your average pulpit on Sunday morning…

One of the theories regarding the cause of schizophrenia suggests that, due to an excessive release of dopamine, the brain remembers too many irrelevant things. Schizophrenics are then overwhelmed by the vast amounts of facts, thoughts and memories all crammed together in their heads, and start processing them into conclusions that aren’t based in reality. It’s called the hyperlearning hypothesis, and researchers at the University of Texas in Austin recently tried to see if they could simulate it – in a computer.

After an hour of work on my inlaw’s Windows machine, I knew there had to be a credible explanation…

No bars. No walls. No armed guards. The prison island of Bastøy in Norway is filled with some of the country’s most hardened criminals. Yet it emphasizes self-control instead of the strictly regulated regimens common in most prisons. For some inmates, it is more than they can handle.

This paradise has been around for 20 years — and has a warden who loves statistics. The numbers, after all, prove him right. Only 16 percent of the prisoners in this island jail become repeat offenders in the first two years after leaving Bastøy as compared with 20 percent for Norway as a whole. In Germany, where recidivism is measured after three years, the rate is 50 percent.

The warden also feels vindicated because there has never been a murder or a suicide on the island — and because no one left Bastøy last winter even though the sea ice was frozen solid.

One only has to look as far as the rabid rhetoric surrounding tougher penalties, harsher prisons and longer sentences coming out of the newly empowered Republican party of the States and the tired rantings of the Conservatives here in Canuckistan to see the brilliance of this article in and of itself.

When more sober minds actually do credible research, they discover that criminals are not afraid of shame, rules, punishment, bondage or being pursued – indeed, they long for all the above and a system that uses the withdrawal of freedom as a punishment is no punishment at all. The twisted irony of the whole thing is that the North American mind is so obsessed with freedom we fail to grasp that there are some who so fear relational responsibility and freedom that our, “Punishments,” are actually a reward and an incentive.

Criminals actually have a problem coping with freedom – not incarceration…

The most effective treatment you can inflict is actually to force a criminal to deal with freedom wherein shame is replaced with having to take responsibility for the longings of one’s own heart and figuring out how to live with relationships in community. The terror that freedom strikes in the hearts of those we call criminals apparently defies the grasp of even professionals in the field.

But, the truth here goes even deeper.

The parallels with what Christ was up to are striking: The God of the universe came down to a system run by legalists who believed the solution for human evil was more rules, bondage and tougher punishments – and He declined to play.

He did the most offensive thing human evil could imagine – He exposed the wardens as worse then the inmates. Then, He took away the system’s power to make inmate or warden bad thereby stripping all of their rules for living. Next, He added insult to injury by instituting an island life where people had to live in freedom, where relational responsibility was unavoidable and where inmate and warden alike have to depend upon such as a guiding force for life given the absence of a big stick of law and punishment to guide them. Ya, no wonder we’ve been trying to get back into prison ever since…

But there’s where the similarity ends. In Norway, when you can’t cope with freedom, you tell the truth about it and put in for a transfer to a prison. They send real wardens with real guns and handcuffs and take you back to a real prison with real walls and barbed wire. No one tries to act like you are not in prison.

In North America, we too can’t handle freedom. We too get our warden/reverends to take us back to a prison of rules – but then we ask them to use words that sound like we are still on the freedom of the island. We ask them to paint the bars of our shame with a seascape of grace like terminology and to tell us that the barbed wire of this strange Evangelical combination of Judaism, Gnosticism and the New Age Movement is really passion driven, heart led relational responsibility.

Not only do we have exactly the same problem with freedom, we also have a problem with reality and truth.

Dr. Maté’s work focuses on the centrality of early childhood experiences to the development of the brain, and how those experiences can impact everything from behavioral patterns to physical and mental illness. While the relationship between emotional stress and disease, and mental and physical health more broadly, is often considered controversial within medical orthodoxy, Dr. Maté argues too many doctors seem to have forgotten what was once a commonplace assumption, that emotions are deeply implicated in both the development of illness, addictions and disorders, and in their healing. [includes rush transcript]

All I have to add is: Thank you medical community — it’s SO about time!!!

The NASA and NOAA boffins used their more accurate science to model a world where CO2 levels have doubled to 780 parts per million (ppm) compared to today’s 390-odd. They say that world would actually warm up by just 1.64°C overall, and the vegetation-cooling effect would be stronger over land to boot – thus temperatures on land would would be a further 0.3°C cooler compared to the present sims.

International diplomatic efforts under UN auspices are currently devoted to keeping global warming limited to 2°C or less, which under current climate models calls for holding CO2 to 450 ppm – or less in many analyses – a target widely regarded as unachievable. Doubled carbon levels are normally viewed in the current state of enviro play as a scenario that would lead to catastrophe; that is, to warming well beyond 2°C.

It now appears, however, that the previous/current state of climate science may simply have been wrong and that there’s really no need to get in an immediate flap. If Bounoua and her colleagues are right, and CO2 levels keep on rising the way they have been lately (about 2 ppm each year), we can go a couple of centuries without any dangerous warming. There are lots of other factors in play, of course, but nonetheless the new analysis is very reassuring.

So, we’ve been sure for years — and anyone who denied it was a denier of the entirety of science. One more spin around the block in your trusty ol’ SUV is gonna finally add the last part per million of the dreaded toxin C02 to the atmosphere and a major ocean current or atmospheric stream is gonna come to a screeching halt and then the next ice age comes sweeping out of the north and we’re all gonna have to move to Mexico — ya, or something…

And then, real scientists (who actually have to be accountable for what they publish) weigh in and we find that it’s gonna take over 200 years of burning hydrocarbons at the current rate (Expert tip here: WE DON’T HAVE THAT MUCH LEFT TO BURN) to even make the scales flicker — if we aren’t into fusion as a power source by then…

Oh, and, what did technology look like 200yrs ago exactly and how much future progress can we extrapolate???

Printing press in 1811

Cannon in 1806

Transportation in 1810

We probably shouldn’t tell the Sierra club but, perhaps destroying our economy, shutting down trade, starving the 3rd world, telling lies about the poor of the world drowning in rising sea levels, running insane commercials about unplugging cell phone chargers and freaking out on people who simply wanna eat grapes in December might be just a little premature…

Last Easter, chef Payton Curry and the crew at cheeky Caffe Boa in Tempe decided to get in the holiday spirit by putting together a special all-rabbit dinner. Public reaction ranged from anger to bemusement. The Easter Bunny went into hiding. Needless to say, the publicity was priceless.

Now, channeling the spirit of Christmas, and firm in the belief that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, the Caffe Boa team is fashioning a multicourse tasting menu featuring – you guessed it – reindeer.

I so wish I lived in Arizona right now…

Google Search: Simply type the keyword you wish to search for in Google and add site:http://cablegate.wikileaks.org/ to your entry. For example: Cablegate search for Putin. (This is a shortcut to using the “search within a site or domain” function of an advanced search–They get you the same results.

Google Cache: You will notice that the links do not work because the normal site is down. Many of them are “cached” by Google, however, so you can just click on that to view the cable. (Minor warning: I have personally found that viewing the cached versions of cables causes Firefox to freeze for a couple seconds.)

Some of the cables are not cached, for which there is an alternate method: Using the same Google results, look at the url of the cable and highlight everything after .org/. Copy this and paste it onto the end of http://213.251.145.96/, which is the new WikiLeaks domain. This leaves you with the direct link to the cable (http://213.251.145.96/cable/2009/10/09MOSCOW2688.html).

Searching directly with the IP address: When I started, I tried this and didn’t get any results. It seems that the new site is slowly being indexed though. http://www.google.com/search?q=site:http://213.251.145.96/+putin does produce some results now. If you want to search the full leak you best bet is still to search with “site:http://cablegate.wikileaks.org/”.

UPDATE: Hosting is back up but DNS is not (due to the US Denial of Service attack killing their DNS registry and new DNS records not yet propagating through the system), you can always brows the main site via IP address as well:

http://213.251.145.96

UPDATE #2: Just a comment: Isn’t it interesting that WL can release all sorts of info on wars and classified military documents — and get little or no response. But, then they indicate that they have information on the money brokers of the United States (and the world) that they are preparing to release, and a cyber war ensues. I wonder where the real seat of power and control in the United States is…

The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms an increase in cognitive “secrecy tax” and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption. Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.

The more I watch the current world wide kangaroo court of Sweden, Interpol and the US government (To say nothing of an idiot republican by the name of Mike Huckabee who thinks they can prosecute for treason a non-American), the more I realize that Assange and his organization may be the last hope for real freedom anywhere on this ball of rock.

This article and all of the linked files are an essential read for anyone who does not relish the idea of political totalitarianism and control over the masses by corporatist elitism.

In His words:

The leak, in other words, is only the catalyst for the desired counter-overreaction; Wikileaks wants to provoke the conspiracy into turning off its own brain in response to the threat. As it tries to plug its own holes and find the leakers, he reasons, its component elements will de-synchronize from and turn against each other, de-link from the central processing network, and come undone. Even if all the elements of the conspiracy still exist, in this sense, depriving themselves of a vigorous flow of information to connect them all together as a conspiracy prevents them from acting as a conspiracy. As he puts it:

If total conspiratorial power is zero, then clearly there is no information flow between the conspirators and hence no conspiracy. A substantial increase or decrease in total conspiratorial power almost always means what we expect it to mean; an increase or decrease in the ability of the conspiracy to think, act and adapt…An authoritarian conspiracy that cannot think is powerless to preserve itself against the opponents it induces.

Some posts require no comment at all…

in states where texting while driving is illegal, there appears to be a “slight increase in the frequency of insurance claims filed under collision coverage for damage to vehicles in crashes.”The finding is based on the institute’s comparisons of claims in four states — California, Washington, Minnesota and Louisiana — before and after texting bans took effect, compared with patterns of claims in nearby states. It could be that drivers who continue to text while driving are doing it more surreptitiously, hiding their phones from view of other drivers and law enforcement, increasing the risk of an accident even more, the institute says.

Apparently, the proponents of yet another law fail to realize that laws were meant to be broken — and that people who need to be controlled by said laws are NEVER made any smarter by the presence of such. (Meanwhile, the rest suffer anyway…)