Teaching Respect

Psychology for Living Gwen Randall-Young
Increasingly, parents and teachers share stories with me about children or students who seemingly have little or no respect for authority. I am shocked when I hear about children swearing at or even hitting their parents. If they get away with this at home, it is not surprising that they carry this disrespect for adults into the classroom.
In some cases, these children are only modeling the disrespect shown to them by adults. It is important for adults to speak respectfully to children, even when they are angry. If adults break all the rules of healthy communication when they are angry, children learn to do this too.
It is never too late to change. Children must be taught to respect adults. They may feel quite powerless if their parents are rude and abusive. However, the behavior of others is never justification for inappropriate behavior ourselves.
If a student feels a teacher is treating him or her disrespectfully, they must not be disrespectful in return. That is not right. What they can do, is to follow  proper channels to make a complaint.
The sanity and safety of our culture is based on rules and respect for the rights of others. If children do not have a sense of respectful boundaries and behaviors, we compromise the future stability of our society.  If we are mean to children, they will become mean adults.  Everyone involved, both children and adults, has a responsibility to work to improve a destructive situation. As adults though, we must take the lead.
Gwen Randall-Young is an author and award-winning Psychotherapist.  For permission to reprint this article, or to obtain books or cds, visit www.gwen.ca

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All the news all the time: Christmas in Paris

All the news all the time: Christmas in Paris: "Original article Posted: 19 Dec 2010 08:31 AM PST Although I may not actually be here on Christmas, it is another holiday season in Par..."

Christmas in Paris

Original article
Posted: 19 Dec 2010 08:31 AM PST

Although I may not actually be here on Christmas, it is another holiday season in Paris, and there are worse places to be.  Snow, which is fairly rare in this area, especially in any quantity, has been coming down like crazy.  The guys at the Canon Factory Service Center will be happy to know that I am getting my camera truly caked in snow, water and dirt on a daily basis and I am sure they can expect an expensive repair order from me soon!  I spent a couple of hours walking the streets last night looking for interesting images.  It gets pretty cold holding that big, metal camera body even with gloves on, but I managed to get a couple of pictures.

A woman walks down the snowy streets of Paris during a pre Christmas snow storm.

Pedestrians make their way home as snow starts to fall

Heavy snow in front of a church in Le Marais, Paris

Lights on the Hotel de Ville

Lights in Le Marais

A man watches his child ride a carousel in central Paris

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Put a Little Palast in Your Stocking

from Greg Palast
For Chanukah, Christmas, Hajj 2010, Kwanzaa or whatever lights your candle, why not give the (tax deductible) gift of Truth?

My latest disguise - fooled you?

This year we have a few suggestions for Holiday gift-giving from the Palast Investigative Fund store:

A Palast Gift Card.  Give an Investigative Fund Gift Card for $100, $50 or any amount you choose.  I will sign and send a card — from you and me — which your gifted one can redeem for items in the Palast Investigative Fund "e-store" including signed books, DVDs, film downloads, audio books and more.

Armed Madhouse, the beautiful Hardbound edition, signed

Palast Investigates, the DVD - A compendium of Greg Palast's ass-kicking BBC Newsnight Television exposés, as seen on Democracy Now!

Digital Downloads, Donate on someone's behalf and gift them a link for a download - These include Big Easy to Big Empty, Palast Investigates, Bush Family Fortunes and more.

We have just returned from Alaska, the Arctic Circle and the Gulf Coast ... and our findings are no less than astonishing.  Get ready for these reports on film and in print.  What we've found will change the national discussion on oil.  The Reader newspaper once wrote, "Can one reporter [Greg Palast] change the national debate?"  No I can't, not alone.  Not without my team and your help.

Please join our effort and consider a year-end tax-deductible donation to our not-for-profit charitable trust.

We are about to fly off to the Caspian Sea ... that's where our (expensive) trail of inside documents leads us.  We have the funding to get there but not get back.  I'm not kidding.  I have faith in you.  This is the moment for an angel like you to carry me home.

We are still looking for 6 mini-moguls to produce our film on Big Oil.


Our entire investigative crew sends you tidings of comfort and joy, a happy and healthy holiday.

- Greg Palast, Reporting

***

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Palast is a Nation Institute/Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow for investigative reporting.

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Clinton probed Argentine leader's 'nerves,' 'anxiety,' 'stress'

By Tim Johnson | McClatchy Newspapers

MEXICO CITY — Seeking a frank evaluation of Argentina's president, the office of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asked the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires late last year to delve into her psyche.
"How is Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner managing her nerves and anxiety?" asked a cable dated Dec. 31, 2009, and signed "CLINTON" in all capital letters.
The cable, sent at 2:55 p.m. on New Year's Eve, and originating in the department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, asked a series of other probing questions as part of what it said was an attempt by her office to understand "leadership dynamics" between Kirchner and her husband, former President Nestor Kirchner.
"How does stress affect her behavior toward advisors and/or her decision making?" the cable continued. "What steps does Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner or her advisers/handlers, take in helping her deal with stress? Is she taking any medications?"
Delving into the personalities of foreign counterparts may be integral to modern diplomatic give-and-take. But the bluntly worded cable asking about the Argentine leader's "nerves" and "emotions" may further test up-and-down relations between Washington and Buenos Aires. The cable suggests that Washington saw Kirchner and her husband as perhaps prone to emotional instability.
The cable was one of several related to Argentina released in the latest batch of U.S. diplomatic traffic made public this week by WikiLeaks, the whistle-blowing website that publishes sensitive government documents.
Under Kirchner and her husband, who ruled the country from 2003 to 2007 and who died Oct. 27 after an apparent heart attack, Argentina has sought alliances with neighboring Bolivia and Venezuela, countries led by strong critics of the United States.
The Clinton cable, classified as "secret," also inquired into the mindset of Kirchner's husband, who was her closest adviser prior to his death.
"Long known for his temper, has Nestor Kirchner demonstrated a greater tendency to shift between emotional extremes? What are most common triggers to Nestor Kirchner's anger?" the cable asked.
The cable described Nestor Kirchner's governing style as "heavy-handed," and asked U.S. diplomats in Buenos Aires to determine whether Cristina Kirchner viewed "circumstances in black and white or in nuanced terms?" Does she have a "strategic, big picture outlook" or does she "prefer to take a tactical view?" it asked.
Other leaked cables offered insight into U.S. interest into a foreign minister's past links with leftist Montoneros guerrillas, and suggested that Argentina had offered to intercede with Bolivian President Evo Morales, who expelled the U.S. ambassador to La Paz in September 2008.
Another confidential cable detailed Argentine umbrage at Assistant Secretary of State Arturo Valenzuela's remarks in late 2009 suggesting that U.S. businesses had concerns over "rule of law and management of the economy in Argentina."
"Once again, the Kirchner government has shown itself to be extremely thin-skinned and intolerant of perceived criticism," the cable said.
The Argentine anger at Valenzuela contrasted with the good relations it held with his predecessor, Thomas Shannon, an Oxford-educated U.S. diplomat with a smooth manner. According to the Madrid daily El Pais, a not-yet-public cable dated Sept. 2, 2008, reveals how Shannon convinced Kirchner that Washington did not have anything against Morales, Bolivia's first indigenous leader, and did not seek to break apart his country.
"Evo is not an easy person," Kirchner told the U.S. ambassador in Buenos Aires at the time, according to the cable cited by the newspaper. It said then-Argentine Foreign Minister Jorge Taiana called a Bolivian counterpart three times to try to lower U.S.-Bolivian tensions.


Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/11/29/104459/clinton-probed-argentine-leaders.html#ixzz16mq9TUMk

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Don't Be an Ass About Airport Security

fighting words

The enemy is inventive and imaginative. Our response is neither.

By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, Nov. 29, 2010, at 11:49 AM ET

---

I did not pay any attention to last week's feeble-minded attempt at a civilian-sponsored go-slow at airport security checkpoints. When the best that the children of a revolution can do for the defense of their inalienable protection against unwarranted search and seizure is to issue the pathetic moan, "Don't touch my junk," a low point of humiliation has been reached. It will soon enough be forgotten, as have the low points that preceded it. And it is destined to be succeeded by even lower and more humbling ones.
Consider: The decision to make us all take off our shoes was the official response to the scrofulous "shoe bomber" Richard Reid. The ban on liquids and precisely specified quantities of gel was the best we could do by way of post-facto thwarting of a London-based scheme to mix liquids in-flight and cause a mid-air detonation. The decision to inquire more closely into our undergarments was the official response to the "underwear bomber" Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. The more recent decision (this was a specifically British touch of genius) to forbid the shipping by air of any print toner weighing more than 500 grams was made after some tampered-with toner cartridges were intercepted on international cargo flights leaving Yemen a few weeks ago. (Fear not, by the way, you can't have these hard-to-find items in your carry-on bags or checked luggage, either.)
In the more recent instances, the explosive substance involved was a fairly simple one known as PETN. Now consider again: Late last August, the Saudi Arabian deputy minister of the interior, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, was injured in the city of Jeddah by a suicide bomber named Abdullah Hassan Al Aseery. The deceased assailant was the brother of Khalid Ibrahim Al Aseery, the suspected bomb-specialist of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and the man sought in connection with the underpants and toner attempts. In the Jeddah case, the lethal charge of PETN was concealed in the would-be assassin's rectum.
Perhaps you can begin to see where, as they say, I am going with this. In order for us to take them even remotely seriously, our Homeland Security officials should by now have had no alternative but to announce a series of random body-cavity searches some months ago. At least that might have had a deterrent effect and broken the long tradition of waiting for the enemy to dictate all the terms, all the time. It is a certainty that this deadly back-passage tactic will be tried. It is equally a certainty that it will find us even more defenseless than before.
Let me recommend regular reading of the magazine Inspire, the flagship publication of AQAP. It is remarkable for its jauntiness and confidence and sense of initiative. The cover of the most recent issue shows the tail of a UPS jet with the headline "$4,200." That was the estimated outlay, for AQAP, of the toner operation that disrupted international air cargo for several days. Inside is a telling comment on the only countermeasure to be taken so far: the ban on toners of a certain weight. "Who is the genius who came up with this suggestion?" jeer the editors. "Do you think we have nothing to send but printers?" (Incidentally, I recommend this analysis of the latest issue of Inspire, written by Shiraz Maher of the International Center for the Study of Radicalization at King's College, London.)
The authors of this propaganda show a natural talent for psychological warfare. It is, one might say, "part and parcel" of the campaign they slightly unoriginally call "a thousand cuts." But the simplicity of that scheme is as self-evident as its cunning. By means of everyday devices and products, plus a swelling number of human volunteers willing to die and kill, they can strike at will and even afford to taunt us in advance. While we pay salaries to thousands and thousands of dogged employees to glare suspiciously at shampoos and shoes and toners, the homicidal adversary discards those means as soon as they are used and switches to another. How they must chortle when they see how sensitive we are to the "invasion of privacy" involved in a close-up grope or a full-on body scan. In preparing their own bodies for paradise, they know no such inhibition. If they guess that we will not even think about how to pre-empt the appalling anal strategy, they so far guess right.
In Robert Harris' brilliant political thriller The Ghost, the Tony Blair character becomes exasperated with facile liberalism and says:

You know what I'd do if I were in power again? I'd say OK then, we'll have two queues at the airports.
On the left, we'll have queues to flights on which we've done no background checks on the passengers: no profiling, no biometric data, nothing that infringes on anyone's precious civil liberties, use no intelligence obtained under torture—nothing. On the right, we'll have queues where we've done everything possible to make them safe for passengers.

His angry challenge to his critics is to see which line those flying with their own children would choose to join. It's a useful thought experiment. At the rate of current progress, however, I rather fear that AQAP might accept that very challenge and make it a point to blow up a plane full of passengers who had stayed in the ostensibly secure line. Or to give up on aviation altogether and start again with trains, which would come to our protectors as a total shock. The new tactics and propaganda of the enemy show them to be both inventive and imaginative. The response of our security state shows it to possess no such qualities.
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Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the Roger S. Mertz media fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2276166/

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