Womxn's March 21 Jan 2017 Seattle

We All Deserve Better than Trump et al!!

Primates in trouble!!

"Our fellow primates are in trouble.

In a study of unprecedented scope, a team of 31 primatologists has analyzed every known species of primate to judge how they are faring. The news for man’s closest animal relatives is not good.

Three-quarters of primate species are in decline, the researchers found, and about 60 percent are now threatened with extinction. From gorillas to gibbons, primates are in significantly worse shape now than in recent decades because of the devastation from agriculture, hunting and mining.

“I think we’re going to get quite a number of extinctions within next 50 years if things go on the way they are,” said Anthony B. Rylands, a senior research scientist at Conservation International and a co-author of the new study, which was published in Science Advances.

“It’s a landmark paper,” said Anne D. Yoder, the director of the Duke Lemur Center, who was not involved in the study. “It’s alarming without being alarmist.”

Taking stock of every primate species on Earth was a huge challenge, in part because scientists keep finding new ones. Since 2000, 85 new primate species have been identified, bringing the total to 505.

Just last week, a team of researchers described a new species of gibbon in China. Dr. Rylands said he knows of at least seven new primate species to be announced this year.

Scientists are finding so many new primate species in part because the destruction of forests is making it easier to reach populations that were once remote.

“There is a certain rush of people in a panic, realizing that if they don’t find and describe them, they will be lost without us ever knowing them,” said Dr. Rylands.

Another reason for the burst of discovery is that scientists have started investigating the DNA of primates, finding that some populations had unique mutations..

“There are distinct species that have been around for millions of years, even though they look to our eyes very similar,” said Dr. Yoder. Unfortunately, she noted, new species revealed by DNA often turn out to exist in perilously low numbers.

The new research was not all bad news for primates.

“Some species are doing O.K.,” said Katherine C. MacKinnon, an anthropologist at Saint Louis University and a co-author of the study. “The ones that are doing O.K. are the ones that aren’t super-specialists, the ones that are most flexible.”

But most species are not so flexible. Every species of ape (including gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans and 19 species of gibbons) is threatened, while 87 percent of lemur species are. Other species that are critically endangered include the brown-headed spider monkey of Ecuador, the Niger Delta red colobus, and the crested macaque, an Indonesian species famous for having taken a selfie with a photographer’s camera.

“It’s worse than we thought 10 years ago,” Dr. MacKinnon said.

She and her colleagues identified a number of human activities pushing primates to the edge, such as hunting. In West Africa, for example, there is a strong demand in local markets for primate meat.

“The forests are still standing, but they’ve shot everything out of it,” said Dr. Rylands.

The incentives to kill primates are not only local, though. A lot of primate meat is making its way to China, along with body parts falsely believed to have healing powers.

“They’ll import enormous amounts from around Southeast Asia,” said Dr. Rylands. “They’re a driving force through the whole region.”

Primates are also threatened by the wholesale destruction of forests to make way for agriculture. In the Amazon, the jungle is being converted to cattle ranches and soybean fields, while in Madagascar, rice paddies are taking the place of lemur forests.

Western countries are also helping push primates toward extinction. Palm oil can be found in everything from doughnuts to lipstick to biodiesel fuel. New palm oil plantations are completely replacing forests in Southeast Asia — one of the most primate-diverse parts of the world.

Even cellphones can add to the risks. In central Africa, miners go into rain forests to dig for an ore called coltan that ends up in phone circuits. Those miners hunt for their meals. “They live on primates,” said Dr. Rylands.

Humans have already driven some primate species extinct, but it’s hard to say exactly how many. Madagascar was once home to giant lemurs that could weigh as much as 350 pounds.

While Western scientists never laid eyes on these remarkable creatures, the fossil record shows that 17 lemur species became extinct after humans arrived there 2,000 years ago.

More recently, a monkey called Miss Waldron’s red colobus has disappeared from its range in West Africa. It has not been spotted for over 25 years and is believed to be extinct. In China, a subspecies called the white-handed gibbon may have gone extinct as well.

Some of the most endangered primate species are down to just a few dozen survivors. Their prospects are grim, because many of them live in parts of the world where human populations are projected to grow the fastest.

In Madagascar, for example, humans may have to move deeper into lemur habitats for new farmland. “It’s a pressure cooker, and there’s no way to relieve the pressure,” said Dr. Yoder.

The authors of the new study offer a number of reasons it is worth trying to halt the crisis.

Recent research has shown that primates are extremely important to the ecosystems in which they live. As they feed on leaves and fruit, for example, they move pollen between trees. They pass seeds in their droppings, allowing plants to spread across a healthy range.

“People used to think of primates as icing on the cake, as not being vital for ecosystems,” said Dr. MacKinnon. “But now we know they are.”

Primates have also been invaluable for understanding ourselves.

The first primates evolved roughly 80 million years ago, and then split into the living lineages over millions of years. By comparing our biology to those of other primates, we have learned about the evolution of our brains, our vision and our vulnerability to diseases.

If those species become extinct, we will lose the opportunity to learn more.

While the prospects are dire, Dr. Rylands said there were concrete steps that can be taken to help primates. “You have to stop hunting them and give them a place to live,” he said.

That is easier said than done, he acknowledged, since the local communities where primates live are often struggling to feed their families. In some cases, it may be possible to take the pressure off primates by building fish farms as an alternate source of protein.

In other cases, communities may be able to make more money over the long term from tourist operations in intact forests than from slash-and-burn agriculture.

Dr. Rylands pointed to the golden lion tamarin as an example of how a primate species can be saved. It once lived in huge numbers in the Atlantic coastal forests of Brazil. After the forests were nearly wiped out to make way for sugar plantations and other forms of agriculture, the species nearly vanished.

In 1983, the U.S. National Zoo led an international effort to bring them back. Monkeys were bred in captivity, forests were conserved and hunting was banned.

Today, the species has a small but stable population of some 3,500 individuals in the wild.

“There are cases where you can bring them back from the brink,” said Dr. Rylands. “But the immensity of the destruction of tropical forests makes it very difficult.”

NY Times

Follow Carl Zimmer on Twitter @carlzimmer

Pain Management??

The following response was sent to me when I commented about how many AIDS patients, and others, I know are being required to enroll in pain management courses to determine whether or not they can continue pain medications. Bob's response is a very sad commentary on challenges heaped on top of the daily lives of those suffering debilitating pain... Link to article.

Thank you, Michael.

I'm a long term AIDS patient in Seattle (Dx:1991) and have lived w/increasing anxiety for the last 6 years about my 20 year daily use of prescription oral morphine @30mg TID (90mg/day) which is just under the 100mg/day limit that GPs/Primary Care MDs can prescribe. Above 100mg/day, oral morphine requires a Pain Mgmt. Specialist since 2010. The younger ones have a different (even punitive) training/perspective/experience than older ones. (I'm 63.)

I had severe/overlapping chronic "shingles" (h.zoster) on my face/scalp 1994-98 and still have ongoing nerve pain there and elsewhere. After a year of oral morphine at 90mg TID (270mg/day), I was moved to large doses of Fentanyl patches, 3x100mcg/hour x3days for 1.5 years (1995-97) and then to 11 months of end-of-life IV morphine (1997-98) averaging 30mg/hour. New neurosurgery in '98 reduced the pain significantly and I went back to oral tablets. My pain hasn't been managed well for the past 3 years as my condition has changed but I've avoided going to a PMSp about increasing my dose. I now have an appointment scheduled and feel some dread about it, based on my previous experience with a younger PMSp in 2010. It should be a conflict of interest to have the same physician in charge of a patient's pain management also in charge of unwanted weaning of opiates in long term patients. And while it is a shame this doctor essentially drove his patient to suicide, I reserve the right to choose the same route if this country's laws drive me to that level of unmanageable pain. I've been there before and won't go there again.

If you have questions contact us at Letkidsbekids@mac.com

Alone, always alone-

Since I first got involved with HIV/AIDS patients I have learned that loneliness, isolation and abandonment contributes to patients outcomes. My book "Ice" shares the stories of many dealing with being ALONE.

This article says it well. 

“My patient and I both knew he was dying.

Not the long kind of dying that stretches on for months or years. He would die today. Maybe tomorrow. And if not tomorrow, the next day. Was there someone I should call? Someone he wanted to see?

Not a one, he told me. No immediate family. No close friends. He had a niece down South, maybe, but they hadn’t spoken in years.

For me, the sadness of his death was surpassed only by the sadness of his solitude. I wondered whether his isolation was a driving force of his premature death, not just an unhappy circumstance.

Every day I see variations at both the beginning and end of life: a young man abandoned by friends as he struggles with opioid addiction; an older woman getting by on tea and toast, living in filth, no longer able to clean her cluttered apartment. In these moments, it seems the only thing worse than suffering a serious illness is suffering it alone.

Social isolation is a growing epidemic — one that’s increasingly recognized as having dire physical, mental and emotional consequences. Since the 1980s, the percentage of American adults who say they’re lonely has doubled from 20 percent to 40 percent.

About one-third of Americans older than 65 now live alone, and half of those over 85 do. People in poorer health — especially those with mood disorders like anxiety and depression — are more likely to feel lonely. Those without a college education are the least likely to have someone they can talk to about important personal matters.

A wave of new research suggests social separation is bad for us. Individuals with less social connection have disrupted sleep patterns, altered immune systems, more inflammation and higher levels of stress hormones. One recent study found that isolation increases the risk of heart disease by 29 percent and stroke by 32 percent.

Another analysis that pooled data from 70 studies and 3.4 million people found that socially isolated individuals had a 30 percent higher risk of dying in the next seven years, and that this effect was largest in middle age.

Loneliness can accelerate cognitive decline in older adults, and isolated individuals are twice as likely to die prematurely as those with more robust social interactions. These effects start early: Socially isolated children have significantly poorer health 20 years later, even after controlling for other factors. All told, loneliness is as important a risk factor for early death as obesity and smoking.

The evidence on social isolation is clear. What to do about it is less so.

Loneliness is an especially tricky problem because accepting and declaring our loneliness carries profound stigma. Admitting we’re lonely can feel as if we’re admitting we’ve failed in life’s most fundamental domains: belonging, love, attachment. It attacks our basic instincts to save face, and makes it hard to ask for help.

I see this most acutely during the holidays when I care for hospitalized patients, some connected to I.V. poles in barren rooms devoid of family or friends — their aloneness amplified by cheerful Christmas movies playing on wall-mounted televisions. And hospitalized or not, many people report feeling lonelier, more depressed and less satisfied with life during the holiday season.

New research suggests that loneliness is not necessarily the result of poor social skills or lack of social support, but can be caused in part by unusual sensitivity to social cues. Lonely people are more likely to perceive ambiguous social cues negatively, and enter a self-preservation mind-set — worsening the problem. In this way, loneliness can be contagious: When one person becomes lonely, he withdraws from his social circle and causes others to do the same.

Dr. John Cacioppo, a psychology professor at the University of Chicago, has tested various approaches to treat loneliness. His work has found that the most effective interventions focus on addressing “maladaptive social cognition” — that is, helping people re-examine how they interact with others and perceive social cues. He is collaborating with the United States military to explore how social cognition training can help soldiers feel less isolated while deployed and after returning home.

The loneliness of older adults has different roots — often resulting from family members moving away and close friends passing away. As one senior put it, “Your world dies before you do.”

Ideally, experts say, neighborhoods and communities would keep an eye out for such older people and take steps to reduce social isolation. Ensuring they have easy access to transportation, through discounted bus passes or special transport services, can help maintain social connections.

Religious older people should be encouraged to continue regular attendance at services and may benefit from a sense of spirituality and community, as well as the watchful eye of fellow churchgoers. Those capable of caring for an animal might enjoy the companionship of a pet. And loved ones living far away from a parent or grandparent could ask a neighbor to check in periodically.

But more structured programs are arising, too. For example, Dr. Paul Tang of the Palo Alto Medical Foundation started a program called linkAges, a cross-generational service exchange inspired by the idea that everyone has something to offer.

The program works by allowing members to post online something they want help with: guitar lessons, a Scrabble partner, a ride to the doctor’s office. Others can then volunteer their time and skills to fill these needs and “bank” hours for when they need something themselves.

“In America, you almost need an excuse for knocking on a neighbor’s door,” Dr. Tang told me. “We want to break down those barriers.”

For example, a college student might see a post from an older man who needs help gardening. She helps him plant a row of flowers and “banks” two hours in the process. A few months later, when she wants to cook a Malaysian meal for her boyfriend, a retired chef comes by to give her cooking lessons.

“You don’t need a playmate every day,” Dr. Tang said. “But knowing you’re valued and a contributing member of society is incredibly reaffirming.”

The program now has hundreds of members in California and plans to expand to other areas of the country with a recent grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

“We in the medical community have to ask ourselves: Are we controlling blood pressure or improving health and well-being?” Dr. Tang said. “I think you have to do the latter to do the former.”

A great paradox of our hyper-connected digital age is that we seem to be drifting apart. Increasingly, however, research confirms our deepest intuition: Human connection lies at the heart of human well-being. It’s up to all of us — doctors, patients, neighborhoods and communities — to maintain bonds where they’re fading, and create ones where they haven’t existed.”

Dhruv Khullar, M.D., M.P.P., is a resident physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

"Ice" is available via http://www.glenbrook.mynetworksolutions.com/

                                                               

Helping Hand

Please pass the word on this Helping Hand opportunity. It is applicable in whatever state you live in.
Today I gave a lady a ride to her Oncologist for ongoing radiation. She didn't know about the Road to Recovery program sponsored but the American Cancer Society. She has spent a fair amount of money transporting herself to Swedish hospital. A social worker at Swedish told her of the service. We, Let Kids Be Kids, Inc.,  http://tinyurl.com/2dsn7f3 do not charge for the ride, we are not compensated in any way or reimbursed for expenses related to this Advocacy/Support outreach. If you want to help us there are links on our website. Please tell Cancer patients to call the American Cancer Society and enquire about the Road to Recovery program. Call: 1-800-227-2345 or contact us letkidsbekids@mac.com

Unacceptable

Donald Trump is directly responsible for these increases in unacceptable behaviors. Were he a real leader he would have made a national speech condemning all of this ongoing discrimination. Don't forget he was the source of the birther movement. "On Monday morning, a Metropolitan Transportation Authority worker in a hijab in addition to her uniform was followed off a subway train at Grand Central Station in Manhattan by a man who shoved her down.

“You shouldn’t be working for the city. You’re a terrorist,” he was heard to say.

On Saturday evening, an off-duty police officer who wears a hijab in and out of uniform dropped her 16-year-old son off by their hone and returned from parking the family car to see a man with a pit bull harassing and pushing him..."

http://tinyurl.com/zcd94ye

Farewell America

"America died on Nov. 8, 2016, not with a bang or a whimper, but at its own hand via electoral suicide. We the people chose a man who has shredded our values, our morals, our compassion, our tolerance, our decency, our sense of common purpose, our very identity — all the things that, however tenuously, made a nation out of a country.

Whatever place we now live in is not the same place it was on Nov. 7. No matter how the rest of the world looked at us on Nov. 7, they will now look at us differently. We are likely to be a pariah country. And we are lost for it. As I surveyed the ruin of that country this gray Wednesday morning, I found weary consolation in W.H. Auden’s poem, September 1, 1939, which concludes:

“Defenseless under the night

Our world in stupor lies;

Yet, dotted everywhere,

Ironic points of light

Flash out wherever the Just

Exchange their messages:

May I, composed like them

Of Eros and of dust,

Beleaguered by the same

Negation and despair,

Show an affirming flame.”

I hunt for that affirming flame.

This generally has been called the “hate election” because everyone professed to hate both candidates. It turned out to be the hate election because, and let’s not mince words, of the hatefulness of the electorate. In the years to come, we will brace for the violence, the anger, the racism, the misogyny, the xenophobia, the nativism, the white sense of grievance that will undoubtedly be unleashed now that we have destroyed the values that have bound us.

We all knew these hatreds lurked under the thinnest veneer of civility. That civility finally is gone.

We all knew these hatreds lurked under the thinnest veneer of civility. That civility finally is gone. In its absence, we may realize just how imperative that politesse was. It is the way we managed to coexist.

If there is a single sentence that characterizes the election, it is this: “He says the things I’m thinking.” That may be what is so terrifying. Who knew that so many tens of millions of white Americans were thinking unconscionable things about their fellow Americans? Who knew that tens of millions of white men felt so emasculated by women and challenged by minorities? Who knew that after years of seeming progress on race and gender, tens of millions of white Americans lived in seething resentment, waiting for a demagogue to arrive who would legitimize their worst selves and channel them into political power? Perhaps we had been living in a fool’s paradise. Now we aren’t.

This country has survived a civil war, two world wars, and a great depression. There are many who say we will survive this, too. Maybe we will, but we won’t survive unscathed. We know too much about each other to heal. No more can we pretend that we are exceptional or good or progressive or united. We are none of those things. Nor can we pretend that democracy works and that elections have more or less happy endings. Democracy only functions when its participants abide by certain conventions, certain codes of conduct and a respect for the process.

No more can we pretend that we are exceptional or good or progressive or united. We are none of those things.

The virus that kills democracy is extremism because extremism disables those codes. Republicans have disrespected the process for decades. They have regarded any Democratic president as illegitimate. They have proudly boasted of preventing popularly elected Democrats from effecting policy and have asserted that only Republicans have the right to determine the nation’s course. They have worked tirelessly to make sure that the government cannot govern and to redefine the purpose of government as prevention rather than effectuation. In short, they haven’t believed in democracy for a long time, and the media never called them out on it.

Democracy can’t cope with extremism. Only violence and time can defeat it. The first is unacceptable, the second takes too long. Though Trump is an extremist, I have a feeling that he will be a very popular president and one likely to be re-elected by a substantial margin, no matter what he does or fails to do. That’s because ever since the days of Ronald Reagan, rhetoric has obviated action, speechifying has superseded governing.

Trump was absolutely correct when he bragged that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and his supporters wouldn’t care. It was a dictator’s ugly vaunt, but one that recognized this election never was about policy or economics or the “right path/wrong path,” or even values. It was about venting. So long as Trump vented their grievances, his all-white supporters didn’t care about anything else. He is smart enough to know that won’t change in the presidency. In fact, it is only likely to intensify. White America, Trump’s America, just wants to hear its anger bellowed. This is one time when the Bully Pulpit will be literal.

The media can’t be let off the hook for enabling an authoritarian to get to the White House. Long before he considered a presidential run, he was a media creation — a regular in the gossip pages, a photo on magazine covers, the bankrupt (morally and otherwise) mogul who hired and fired on The Apprentice. When he ran, the media treated him not as a candidate, but as a celebrity, and so treated him differently from ordinary pols. The media gave him free publicity, trumpeted his shenanigans, blasted out his tweets, allowed him to phone in his interviews, fell into his traps and generally kowtowed until they suddenly discovered that this joke could actually become president.

Just as Trump has shredded our values, our nation and our democracy, he has shredded the media. In this, as in his politics, he is only the latest avatar of a process that began long before his candidacy. Just as the sainted Ronald Reagan created an unbridgeable chasm between rich and poor that the Republicans would later exploit against Democrats, conservatives delegitimized mainstream journalism so that they could fill the vacuum.

With Trump’s election, I think that the ideal of an objective, truthful journalism is dead, never to be revived.

Retiring conservative talk show host Charlie Sykes complained that after years of bashing from the right wing, the mainstream media no longer could perform their function as reporters, observers, fact dispensers, and even truth tellers, and he said we needed them. Like Goebbels before them, conservatives understood that they had to create their own facts, their own truths, their own reality. They have done so, and in so doing effectively destroyed the very idea of objectivity. Trump can lie constantly only because white America has accepted an Orwellian sense of truth — the truth pulled inside out.

With Trump’s election, I think that the ideal of an objective, truthful journalism is dead, never to be revived. Like Nixon and Sarah Palin before him, Trump ran against the media, boomeranging off the public’s contempt for the press. He ran against what he regarded as media elitism and bias, and he ran on the idea that the press disdained working-class white America. Among the many now-widening divides in the country, this is a big one, the divide between the media and working-class whites, because it creates a Wild West of information – a media ecology in which nothing can be believed except what you already believe.

With the mainstream media so delegitimized — a delegitimization for which they bear a good deal of blame, not having had the courage to take on lies and expose false equivalencies — they have very little role to play going forward in our politics. I suspect most of them will surrender to Trumpism — if they were able to normalize Trump as a candidate, they will no doubt normalize him as president. Cable news may even welcome him as a continuous entertainment and ratings booster. And in any case, like Reagan, he is bulletproof. The media cannot touch him, even if they wanted to. Presumably, there will be some courageous guerillas in the mainstream press, a kind of Resistance, who will try to fact-check him. But there will be few of them, and they will be whistling in the wind. Trump, like all dictators, is his own truth.

What’s more, Trump already has promised to take his war on the press into courtrooms and the halls of Congress. He wants to loosen libel protections, and he has threatened Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos of Amazon with an antitrust suit. Individual journalists have reason to fear him as well. He has already singled out NBC’s Katy Tur, perhaps the best of the television reporters, so that she needed the Secret Service to escort her from one of his rallies. Jewish journalists who have criticized Trump have been subjected to vicious anti-Semitism and intimidation from the alt-right. For the press, this is likely to be the new normal in an America in which white supremacists, neo-Nazi militias, racists, sexists, homophobes and anti-Semites have been legitimized by a new president who “says what I’m thinking.” It will be open season.

This converts the media from reporters totargets, and they have little recourse. Still, if anyone points the way forward, it may be New York Times columnist David Brooks. Brooks is no paragon. He always had seemed to willfully neglect modern Republicanism’s incipient fascism (now no longer incipient), and he was an apologist for conservative self-enrichment and bigotry. But this campaign season, Brooks pretty much dispensed with politics. He seemed to have arrived at the conclusion that no good could possibly come of any of this and retreated into spirituality. What Brooks promoted were values of mutual respect, a bolder sense of civic engagement, an emphasis on community and neighborhood, and overall a belief in trickle-up decency rather than trickle-down economics. He is not hopeful, but he hasn’t lost all hope.

For those of us now languishing in despair, this may be a prescription for rejuvenation. We have lost the country, but by refocusing, we may have gained our own little patch of the world and, more granularly, our own family. For journalists, Brooks may show how political reporting, which, as I said, is likely to be irrelevant in the Trump age, might yield to a broader moral context in which one considers the effect that policy, strategy and governance have not only on our physical and economic well-being but also on our spiritual well-being. In a society that is likely to be fractious and odious, we need a national conversation on values. The media could help start it.

But the disempowered media may have one more role to fill: They must bear witness. Many years from now, future generations will need to know what happened to us and how it happened. They will need to know how disgruntled white Americans, full of self-righteous indignation, found a way to take back a country they felt they were entitled to and which they believed had been lost. They will need to know about the ugliness and evil that destroyed us as a nation after great men like Lincoln and Roosevelt guided us through previous crises and kept our values intact. They will need to know, and they will need a vigorous, engaged, moral media to tell them. They will also need us.

We are not living for ourselves anymore in this country. Now we are living for history."

Bill Moyers

Women's rights

Amazing how so many people, particularly women, didn't seem to understand who they were voting for.

Here is one woman's voice.

"Mike Pence has proven himself to be disastrous for women’s health and gay rightsduring his term as governor of Indiana (and that’s not even getting into his weird Mulanconspiracy theory) — and now he’s the vice-president-elect of the United States. 

During an emotional Friday-night segment of her MSNBC show, Rachel Maddow pointed to Pence’s numerous anti-gay beliefs and policies, ones she says were largely ignored during the presidential race. 

For instance, back in 1997 the state of Indiana passed a law that banned lying on applications for your marriage license; because their forms only gave the option for one man and one woman to apply, any homosexual couple applying for a license would be de facto “lying.” In 2013, Pence updated the law and made it a level-six felony to lie on your application, the punishment for which was up to 18 months in prison and a potential fine of $10,000. “Just applying to get married would put you in jail under Mike Pence,” Maddow said. 

Pence — whom Maddow calls “the most vociferously and consistently anti-gay statewide elected official in the country” — also suggested taking away funding from HIV and AIDs and diverting it “toward those institutions which provide assistance to those seeking to change their sexual behavior” (a.k.a. gay-conversion therapy).

“Mike Pence is really, really out there on his anti-gay politics,” Maddow added. “He’s on the very edge of the branch, on the very edge of the twig, on the end of the branch, on the last leaf on that twig.”

Sleeping Bags

Handing out sleeping bags and survival kits on the streets of Seattle this Saturday. MBarettMiller/Let Kids Be Kids, Inc.

Wikileaks

Hey America,

When did we become a country that applauds the end of privacy?

Yea, Wikileaks is "cool" when it goes after someone we don't like, but what happens if they dump "our secrets?" Are we okay with a stranger stealing your mail (electronic & physical), your photos, your ID (just wait until it happens to you!) every post you've ever written and then deleted before sending---

Whats wrong here when this level of breaking and entering is okay??

Time to re-visit what’s actually going on...

Road to Recovery - phone worries

Not sure what to conclude on this. I gave a Cancer patient a ride to Chemo today. The patient told me he/she has four adult kids in the area that are unable to reliably give rides. His/Her biggest concern is a middle of the night call to the kids who won't answer their phones or read a text in the middle of the night. Its not that they are hard hearted but part of a couple of generations that tend not to answer phone calls or quickly react to texts. We decided 911 would probably be the answer---
If you want to help us with costs here is a link to Universal Giving http://tinyurl.com/hsx9lfp or through Pay Pals Charitable Fund http://tinyurl.com/z42hsx6
"Volunteer drivers donate their time and the use of their cars so that patients can receive the life-saving treatments they need. If you or your loved one needs a ride to treatment, call the American Cancer Society at 1-800-227-2345 to be matched with a volunteer, or enter your zip code in the box in the link below to check for programs in your area."
http://www.cancer.org/…/supportprogramsser…/road-to-recovery
Please pass the word on this free service to Cancer patients.

Would you hide a Jew from the Nazis?

Would You Hide a Jew From the Nazis?

NY Times: Nicholas Kristof

“WHEN representatives from the United States and other countries gathered in Evian, France, in 1938 to discuss the Jewish refugee crisis caused by the Nazis, they exuded sympathy for Jews — and excuses about why they couldn’t admit them. Unto the breach stepped a 33-year-old woman from Massachusetts named Martha Sharp.

With steely nerve, she led one anti-Nazi journalist through police checkpoints in Nazi-occupied Prague to safety by pretending that he was her husband.

Another time, she smuggled prominent Jewish opponents of Naziism, including a leading surgeon and two journalists, by train through Germany, by pretending that they were her household workers.

“If the Gestapo should charge us with assisting the refugees to escape, prison would be a light sentence,” she later wrote in an unpublished memoir. “Torture and death were the usual punishments.”

Sharp was in Europe because the Unitarian Church had asked her and her husband, Waitstill Sharp, a Unitarian minister, if they would assist Jewish refugees. Seventeen others had refused the mission, but the Sharps agreed — and left their two small children behind in Wellesley, Mass.

Their story is told in a timely and powerful new Ken Burns documentary, “Defying the Nazis: The Sharps’ War.” The documentary will air on PBS on Tuesday evening — just as world leaders conclude two days of meetings in New York City about today’s global refugee crisis, an echo of the one in the late 1930s.

“There are parallels,” notes Artemis Joukowsky, a grandson of the Sharps who conceived of the film and worked on it with Burns. “The vitriol in public speech, the xenophobia, the accusing of Muslims of all of our problems — these are similar to the anti-Semitism of the 1930s and ’40s.”

The Sharps’ story is a reminder that in the last great refugee crisis, in the 1930s and ’40s, the United States denied visas to most Jews. We feared the economic burden and worried that their ranks might include spies. It was the Nazis who committed genocide, but the U.S. and other countries also bear moral responsibility for refusing to help desperate people.

That’s a thought world leaders should reflect on as they gather in New York to discuss today’s refugee crisis — and they might find inspiration from those like the Sharps who saw the humanity in refugees and are today honored because of it.

Take Poland, where some Poles responded to Nazi occupation by murdering Jews, while the Polish resistance (including, I’m proud to say, my father’s family) fought back and tried to wake the world’s conscience. One Pole, Witold Pilecki, sneaked into Auschwitz to gather intelligence and alert the world to what was happening.

Likewise, a Polish farmer named Jozef Ulma and his wife, Wiktoria, sheltered desperate members of two Jewish families in their house. The Ulmas had six small children and every reason to be cautious, but they instead showed compassion.

Someone reported them, and the Gestapo raided the Ulmas’ farmhouse. The Nazis first shot the Jews dead, and then took retribution by executing not just Jozef and Wiktoria (who was seven months pregnant) but also all their children. The entire family was massacred.

Another great hero was Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a Portuguese consul general in France as the war began.

Portugal issued strict instructions to its diplomats to reject most visa requests from Jews, but Sousa Mendes violated those orders. “I would rather stand with God and against man,” he said, “than with man and against God.”

By some estimates, he issued visas for 30,000 refugees.

Furious at the insubordination, Portugal’s dictator recalled Sousa Mendes and put him on trial for violating orders. Sousa Mendes was convicted and his entire family was blacklisted, so almost all his children were forced to emigrate. Sousa Mendes survived by eating at soup kitchens and selling family furniture; he died in 1954 in poverty, debt and disgrace.

“The family was destroyed,” notes Olivia Mattis, president of a foundation set up in 2010 to honor Sousa Mendes, who saved her father’s family.

As today’s leaders gather for their summit sessions, they should remember that history eventually sides with those who help refugees, not with those who vilify them.

Currently, only a small number of leaders have shown real moral courage on refugees — hurray for Angela Merkel and Justin Trudeau — and even President Obama’s modest willingness to accept 10,000 Syrians has led him to be denounced by Donald Trump.

Without greater political will, this week’s meetings may be remembered as no better than the 1938 Evian Conference, and history will be unforgiving.

“We must think of Sousa Mendes’s heroism in today’s context,” Jorge Helft, a Holocaust survivor who as a French boy received one of Sousa Mendes’s visas, told me. “I have dinners in Paris where people start saying we have to kick all these people out, there are dangerous people among them.” He paused and added, “I remember being on a ship to New York and hearing that some Americans didn’t want to let us in because there were Nazi spies among us.

“Yes, there might have been Nazi spies, but a tiny minority,” he said, just as there might be spies among Syrian refugees today, but again a tiny minority. “Ninety-five percent or more of these people are decent, and they are fleeing from death. So let’s not forget them.”

Spanish Riding School

Finally!!

"The end of male dominance has began as the over 450- year-old Spanish riding school of Vienna, renowned for its white horses and immaculate equestrianism, presented its first ever woman rider.

"I am so very proud to be here, which has nothing to do with being a woman," 29-year-old Hannah Zeitlhofer said. Back in 2008 the school in the center of Vienna opened its training to women. After eight years of learning Hannah Zeitlhofer will now be in charge of several horses as well teaching at the school. She says there is no battle of the sexes at the riding school, adding: "Here you are accepted 100 percent as a woman and I'm very pleased about that."

The riding school belongs to UNESCO's intangible World Heritage. Heading the institution since 2007 has been the entrepreneurial society dame Elisabeth Gürtler. The traditional school for Lipizzan horses in the Hofburg offers public performances as well as permitting public viewings of some training sessions making it a popular tourist attraction. Every year some 300,000 people visit the sold-out dressage performances in Vienna, the stables in Piber near Graz or the training center in the lower-Austrian Huldenberg."

SaveSave

Snow Leopard

Please, before you go to sleep tonight, think of ways you can reach out and help all the creatures out there-----humans as well. 

Snow Leopards. These rare, beautiful gray leopards live in the mountains of Central Asia. They are insulated by thick hair, and their wide, fur-covered feet act as natural snowshoes. Snow leopards have powerful legs and are tremendous leapers, able to jump as far as 50 feet (15 meters). They use their long tails for balance and as blankets to cover sensitive body parts against the severe mountain chill. woodland Park Zoo contributes to programs in Central Asia to help preserve these great animals
Let Kids Be Kids advocates for the rights of all those in the animal kingdom. Yep, humans too-----And, in particular, all those Snow Leopards out there.
Photos: MBarrettMiller/Connemara Productions 9 September 2016

You can help us with our animal advocacy via          https://www.paypal.com/fundraiser/charity/23265