Monthly Archives: March 2012

The Joy of Rescued Pets

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Dr. Patricia Fitzgerald

Wellness Editor, The Huffington Post; doctor of acupuncture and Oriental medicine; nutritionist; author

Happy Tails: Amazing Stories of Rescued Pets

Posted: 02/29/2012 8:48 am

It was love at first sight. When I went to my local animal shelter more than six years ago, I thought of it as a first step — I was planning on researching carefully all of my options, visiting several shelters and rescues, and taking my time to find my new canine companion. Ten minutes later, I was on the phone with my husband, explaining why we had to bring home a 7-year-old Beagle-German Shepherdish-looking mutt with advanced cataracts named Charlie. He was found as a stray, so I had to wait a week until he was available for adoption in case his owner came to claim him. I visited him every day, leading up to the day he was available. I was super nervous and couldn’t sleep the night before, worried that other people would want to adopt him, too. I had already become so attached!

When we went to the shelter the next morning (a half an hour before they opened, just in case), I remember worrying that everyone else at the shelter was also there to adopt Charlie. After all, he was the cutest dog ever.

Boy, was I naïve! Like so many things in life, you don’t know until you know. It didn’t really occur to me that older dogs at shelters are often the last ones to be adopted, if at all. I also didn’t know that most animals don’t make it out of shelters alive.

It turned out that nobody else had come to adopt Charlie, so he was mine (for all of $28.00, including a microchip and shots, and he was already neutered). That same morning, my husband fell in love with an 8-year-old adorable Beagle-Bassett named Simba. We left that shelter that day with two dogs, and it has been a love affair ever since!

The decision to be a pet guardian is an enormous one. There are many factors to consider when deciding what kind of pet to bring home — large or small, young or old, dog, cat, or tortoise — and especially where to find your new animal companion.

According to the ASPCA, there are between 5 and 7 million animals in shelters across the country. And of those, 3-4 million will be euthanized — that’s 60 percent of dogs and 70 percent of cats. Most of those animals are euthanized simply because there is no one to adopt them. And yet, despite this overwhelming need, 15-20 percent of new pets are purchased from breeders, while only around 10 percent are adopted from shelters.

And it’s not just mutts who suffer. On Valentine’s Day of 2012, a Pekingese was named Best in Show at Westminster — which, sadly, will likely mean pain and suffering for thousands of Pekingese in years to come. Each year, Westminster contributes to Americans’ desire for purebred puppies — often bred in inhumane puppy mills. Then, sadder still, millions of these dogs end up housed in shelters after their novelty wears off, and are eventually put to sleep. Over a quarter of dogs euthanized in shelters are purebred.

This tremendous need may be the best reason to bring a rescue pet into your home — but it’s far from the only one. There have been literally hundreds of studies showing that pet companionship is good for humans — from a physical level to a spiritual one. Recent studies have shown that pet owners have lower levels of risk factors for cardiovascular disease, spend less on health care, and have stronger immune systems. Beyond that, pet ownership contributes to physical fitness, sociability (so easy to talk to a stranger who is walking a dog), self-esteem — and pure joy and bliss.

On a wider, societal level, rescued pets have been the catalyst of some profound healing of the hearts of those often marginalized. A great example is K9 Connection, a California-based group that came up with an innovative way to tackle two problems at once — alongside the millions of dogs and cats euthanized each year, there are thousands of teenagers who take their lives each year. At K9 connection, at-risk teens train homeless shelter dogs. Dogs who were doomed for death are adopted into loving homes. The impact on the teens is profound as the healing power of the human-animal bond does its work.

The healing that takes place at prisons across the country which have programs pairing rescue dogs with inmates is extraordinary. Shelter dogs are saved from euthanasia and given training, and the prisoners benefit from the companionship, responsibility, and the satisfaction that they are helping to save the life of such a beautiful, vulnerable creature. Some prisoners report that they had never had the experience of unconditional love until they started training a rescue dog.

Some groups that facilitate these amazing programs include Project POOCH, Prison Tails, and Paws in Prison.

Nationally, rescued pets are becoming increasingly visible. Since the world’s first viral video of a kitten doing something adorable was posted on YouTube, it’s been well recognized that watching cute animal antics is perhaps second to none among our favorite activities. This year at the Super Bowl, Budweiser capitalized on that love, running a commercial with a tiny dog named Weego, trained to fetch beer. However, their interests were in more than just selling six-packs: Weego was a rescue dog, and the commercial raised more than a quarter of a million dollars for the Tony La Russa Animal Rescue Foundation. Moreover, it’s done a great job drawing attention to how great rescue pets can be; Bud Light’s Facebook page tells the story of Weego, and has gotten amazing engagement from tens of thousands of people, sharing stories about rescue pets.

from:   http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-patricia-fitzgerald/pet-adoption_b_1308093.html?ref=mindful-living&ir=Mindful%20Living

Deepak Chopra on The Brain & Consciousness

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  • Deepak Chopra

Author, ‘War of the Worldviews’; Founder, The Chopra Foundation

A New Era for the Brain — Guiding Your Own Evolution

Posted: 03/ 1/2012 8:20 am
 One of the great abilities of the human brain is to boost itself into a higher function. No one can explain how this happens. By the time early humans discovered fire and simple tools like the wheel and lever, our brains were already the most complex structure in the universe. We then proceeded to use this structure in unprecedented ways. Somewhere in our DNA was the potential for higher mathematics, for example, even though Homo sapiens existed for 200,000 years without tapping that capacity.

The reason that we are able to accomplish huge, never-ending leaps needs to be solved. If it can, then a new era will open up for the brain. The key is not materialistic, to my mind. One needs to begin, in fact, by turning away from the brain, whose intricate workings have mesmerized researchers for three decades, ever since the development of feasible brain scans. Such advances are fascinating, but we run the risk of sitting around a radio as it plays Mozart, staring at how the transistors work while imagining that we are uncovering the secrets of music.

Once you stop staring at the brain and start exploring the music it plays — i.e., the richness of human thoughts, feelings, images and sensations — a simple truth emerges. There is something more complex in the cosmos than the human brain: the process that makes the brain work. This process involves consciousness. It is our mind that is using the brain, not the other way around. (I would argue that the brain is a creation of the mind, a physical projection of consciousness. But that argument can be set aside for another day.) If we could understand the process that underlies the entire brain, instead of focusing in reductionist fashion on bits and pieces of brain function, doors would suddenly be flung open.

Let me suggest a beginning.

What we already know are a few fundamentals that apply to everything happening in the brain. Some functions are already confirmed by brain scans; others arise from deduction, working form observed facts to larger principles.

1. The process always involves feedback loops.

2. These feedback loops are intelligent.

3. The dynamics of the brain go in and out of balance but always favor overall balance, known as homeostasis.

4. We use our brains to evolve and develop, guided by our intentions.

5. Self-reflection pushes us forward into unknown territory.

6. Many diverse areas of the brain are coordinated simultaneously.

7. We have the capacity to monitor many levels of awareness, even though our focus is generally confined to one level (i.e., waking, sleeping, and dreaming).

8. All the qualities of the known world, such as sight, sounds, textures, and tastes, are created mysteriously by the interaction of mind and brain.

9. Mind is the origin of consciousness, not the brain.

10. Only consciousness can understand consciousness. There is no mechanical explanation that suffices, working from facts about the brain.

This list bridges two worlds, biology and philosophy. Biology is great at explaining physical processes but totally inadequate to tell us about the meaning and purpose of our subjective experience. Philosophy delves deeply into meaning but has made only tentative forays into the brain. Both worlds are needed to understand ourselves. Otherwise, we fall into the biological fallacy, which holds that humans are controlled by their brains, or the philosophical fallacy, which treats experience devoid of its physiological connection. Leaving aside countless arguments between various theories of mind and brain, the goal is clear: We want to use our brains, not have them use us.

I’d like to expand on the practical uses of the 10 principles listed above — they would be merely intriguing if they remained abstractions but incredibly practical if they lead to the next phase of human evolution. That phase involves using the brain better, something that human beings excel at. We are driven to greater creativity, complexity, imaginative leaps and unknown horizons. “Better” doesn’t mean more efficiently, the way technology improves a computer. In fact, by giving technicalities over to machines, we left more room for using our brains outside technology. In a world where every sort of calculation is done automatically, at the push of a button or the stroke of a keypad, assigning the brain a more evolved role poses the hugest challenge.

In the following posts I’ll suggest a new synthesis that takes the most basic aspects of brain function — feedback, self-reflection, homeostasis and multi-dimensional consciousness — to show that the era of higher brain function has arrived, awaiting only how you and I choose to participate.

from:    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/deepak-chopra/brain-mind_b_1304000.html?ref=mindful-living&ir=Mindful%20Living

Women’s Rights and the Blunt Amendment

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Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand

U.S. Senator from New York

 Standing Strong Against the Extreme Blunt Amendment
Posted: 03/ 1/2012 10:12 am

In recent weeks, I’ve said repeatedly that I was dumb-founded that in 2012 we are actually debating whether women should have access to contraception. I had no idea I’d be even more dumb-founded today, when, instead of coming together to fix our economy and strengthen the middle class, the Senate is considering a measure so extreme that it would allow any employer — religious or secular — to deny their employees coverage of any preventive service, including contraception, mammograms –anything the employer deems unfit to be covered.

Let me say this once and for all: the power to decide whether to use contraception or any other preventive care service should be up to each individual woman, not her boss.

Of course, the Blunt Amendment is just the latest attack on women’s health from the far right wing in Congress. Whether it’s their attempt to defund Planned Parenthood or to roll back a common sense preventive care provisions in the Affordable Care Act, make no mistake about it, this concerted effort to reduce women’s access to essential preventive care demonstrates a callous disregard for the health and safety of women.

Attacks like these are why Senator Boxer and I started One Million Strong For Women, to build a grassroots movement of Americans fed up with the far right’s attempts to undermine women’s health. We’ve been joined by several champions in the Senate including Senator Schumer, Senator Reid, Senator Franken, Senator Blumenthal, Senator Murray, the DSCC as well as over 260,000 of you. I hope you’ll add your voice today as well.

Let’s be clear. Neither the recent controversy over the HHS contraception rule or this week’s Blunt Amendment has anything to do with religious freedom. You don’t have to take it from me, just ask Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. In the majority decision of the 1990 case Employment Division v. Smith, Justice Scalia wrote, “We have never held that an individual’s religious beliefs excuse him from compliance with an otherwise valid law prohibiting that the State is free to regulate.”

The extreme amendment Republicans are bringing up for a vote makes it clear as day — this is a political and ideological overreach — not a religious issue. The fact they want to exempt all businesses from providing any preventive care for women is outrageous.

Please know that we will not stand for these attempts to undermine the ability of women to make their own decisions. If our Republican colleagues want to continue to take this issue head on, we will stand up as often as necessary to draw a line in the Senate and oppose these attacks against women’s rights and women’s health.

I hope you’ll join us at OneMillionStrongForWomen.com.

It is time to agree that women deserve access to preventive health services, regardless of where they work. And it is time to agree to get back to work on legislation that can create jobs and grow the economy.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-kirsten-gillibrand/standing-strong-against-t_b_1313090.html?ref=impact&ir=Impact

Tomb Suggests Early Evidence for Christianity

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Possible Earliest Evidence of Christianity Resurrected from Ancient Tomb

Wynne Parry, LiveScience Senior Writer
Date: 28 February 2012 Time: 10:00 AM ET
An engraving depicting a large fish thought to represent the story of the Biblical prophet Jonah found on an ossuary in a Tomb. It and an inscription found elsewhere in the tomb may be the oldest archaeological evidence of Christianity, excavators say.
An engraving depicting a large fish thought to represent the story of the Biblical prophet Jonah found in a tomb. It and an inscription in the same tomb may be the oldest archaeological evidence of Christianity, excavators say.
CREDIT: Simcha Jacobovici

In an ancient tomb located below a modern condominium building in Jerusalem, archaeologists have found ossuaries — bone boxes for the dead — bearing engravings that could represent the earliest archaeological evidence of Christians ever found.

The tomb has been dated to before A.D. 70, so if its engravings are indeed early Christian, they were most likely made by some of Jesus’ earliest followers, according to the excavators.

One of the limestone ossuaries bears an inscription in Greek that includes a reference to “Divine Jehovah” raising someone up. A second ossuary has an image that appears to be a large fish with a stick figure in its mouth. The excavators believe the image represents the story of Jonah, the biblical prophet who was swallowed by a fish or whale and then released.

Together both the inscription and the image of the fish represent the Christian belief in resurrection from death. While images of the Jonah story became common on more recent Christian tombs, they do not appear in first-century art, and iconographic images like this on ossuaries are extremely rare.

“If anyone had claimed to find either a statement about resurrection or a Jonah image in a Jewish tomb of this period I would have said impossible — until now,” James D. Tabor, professor and chairman of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and one of the excavators, said in a news release issued by the university.

The excavators acknowledge the discovery and their interpretation are likely to be controversial.

This tomb was originally uncovered in 1981, but the original excavators were forced to leave by Orthodox Jewish groups who oppose the excavation of Jewish tombs. The tomb was then resealed and buried beneath the condominium complex in the neighborhood of East Talpiot. Almost two decades later, Tabor and colleagues got a license to go back into the tomb; however, because of the condos on top of it and the threat of protests from Orthodox Jewish groups, they took an unconventional route into the tomb.

They inserted a robotic arm, developed for this project, carrying high-definition cameras, through holes drilled in the basement floor of the building. The cameras photographed the ossuaries inside from all sides.

This tomb is located adjacent to another one, uncovered in 1980, that contained ossuaries with names some have associated with Jesus and his family. That tomb was thoroughly excavated at the time.

An article by Tabor describing the discovery is scheduled for publication online at The Bible and Interpretation today (Feb. 28). A book, “The Jesus Discovery: The New Archaeological Find That Reveals the Birth of Christianity” (Simon & Schuster, 2012), co-authored by Tabor and filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici, is also being published today. Later this spring, a documentary on the subject will air on the Discovery Channel.

from:    http://www.livescience.com/18697-christianity-evidence-tomb-inscriptions.html

El Hierro Update

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El Hierro Volcano : Yellow-Red alert

Last update: March 1, 2012 at 3:49 pm by By 

Update 01/03 – 15:49 UTC
– NO new earthquakes
– NO change in HT
– ITER is currently installing more instruments at the Tacoron area. Currently someone has to go to Tacoron to do a number of manual measurements.  The new instruments will send data in real-time to the analysts. Once this has been tested, people will be allowed to enter this sector of the island.
– Joke Volta March 1 morning images

Update 01/03 – 09:12 UTC
– A short revival of harmonic tremor for a couple of minutes at 01:16. It has not repeated since then.
– The eruption webcam is frozen again for the second day in a row.  Hopefully the disturbance is not due to a serious problem.
– 4 earthquakes since midnight varying from M 0.6 to M 1.3, depths from 10 to 16 km. Epicenters on the usual line from Frontera to the main vent.
– Today is the last day of the INVOLCAN course Joke is following. She is very positive about this initiative. Compared to the Geology course given by Ramon Casillas from the University of La Laguna who was focusing more to the specific technical details of volcanoes and tectonics, the Involcan course is zooming in on the many dangers for property and population. Joke was surprised that Lahars, toxic gases, lava flows, landslides, explosions etc has caused many casualties in the past.  The El Hierro eruption goes on and on and looks like a peaceful event (what it surely is at this time), but in other places of the world volcanoes can cause a lot of misery. The pictures below have been taken during the Involcan course.
– Poets from everywhere in the world showed their solidarity with the people of El Hierro during a poetry event yesterday at La Restinga (pictures of this event : click here)

Involcan course about volcano risks at El Pinar

Update 29/02 – 23:55 UTC
– The day ended with only 4 earthquakes
– almost no HT
– No stain or jacuzzi
– we are very curious for the next couple of days. If the present situation continues for another week, Pevolca might decrease the alert levels

Update 29/02 – 15:46 UTC
– 4 earthquakes so far today
– In the many mails we received from Joke yesterday and after midnight today (yes, she often works until after midnight), something escaped our attention. An earthquake at 05:02 yesterday morning with an epicenter to the east of the La Restinga reef (in between El Hierro and Tenerife).
In a message later yesterday and before Joke had seen this earthquake location, she told us about a stain in that same area. When climbing montaña La Restinga, she usually looks both sides of the La Restinga. She found it strange to see a stain in that part of the sea (especially as we had no more stains above the main vent for many days). She indicated the stain spot in her image series from yesterday afternoon, adding a map with the location.  There are no signs that this is a viable reason for a new emission vent as the quake was reported at a depth of 20 km, but the least we can say is that this event is rather unusual and not immediately explainable, unless the stain drifted away from the main vent.

Update 29/02 – 09:23 UTC
– 2 great videos for Volcano Lovers : with special thanks to AVCAN, who gave us the lead for them.  We have embedded them in our Volcano News updates.

Update 29/02 – 07:55 UTC
– 3 earthquakes so far today. Magnitudes : 1.1, 0.8 and 1.3. Depths in between 7 and 12 km.
– unchanged harmonic tremor
– continuing micro-seismicity
– no visible stain or jacuzzi on the eruption webcam

for more information, go to:   http://earthquake-report.com/2011/09/25/el-hierro-canary-islands-spain-volcanic-risk-alert-increased-to-yellow/

Jeff Masters on Possibility of Tornadoes 3/2

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The winter of 2012 blew out like a lion yesterday, with a massive Leap Day storm that pounded the Midwest with deadly tornadoes and heavy snow. A violent EF-4 tornado with 180 mph winds tore through Harrisburg, Illinois at 4:56 am CST yesterday morning, killing six, injuring approximately 100, and damaging 200 homes and 25 businesses. The tornado cut a path seven miles long and 250 yards wide across the town, according to the NWS damage survey. Another person was killed in southwest Missouri near Buffalo when am EF-2 tornado ripped through a mobile home park late Wednesday night. Twelve others were injured in the mobile home park. Four additional deaths occurred due to tornadoes in Cassville, MO, Smithville, TN, and Monterey, TN yesterday, bringing the death toll of the two-day severe weather outbreak to eleven. An EF-2 tornado also plowed through downtown Branson, Missouri yesterday morning, injuring 33 people. The tornado blew out or cracked windows in 219 of the hotel rooms in the 12-story/295 room Hilton Branson Convention Center, and extensively damaged three of Branson’s 50 plus theaters–Americana Theater, Branson Variety Theater and Dick Clarks’ American Bandstand Theater. The Branson Landing on Lake Taneycomo and the Veterans Memorial Museum were also heavily damaged. An NWS storm survey found the tornado was 400 yards wide and carved a path 22 miles long. An EF-2 tornado also hit the small town of Harveyville, Kansas (population 275), twenty miles southwest of Topeka, at 9:03 pm Wednesday night. The tornado destroyed 40 – 60% of the structures and injured twelve, three critically. Overall, damage from the two-day tornado outbreak will run in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and could add up to be the first billion-dollar weather disaster of 2012 in the U.S.


Figure 1. Damage in Branson, Missouri after yesterday’s tornado. Image credit: BransonRecovery Facebook page.

Yesterday’s tornado outbreak’s place in history
Yesterday was the deadliest day for U.S. tornadoes since May 24, 2011, when 18 people died in a Midwest tornado outbreak–part of the five-day outbreak that brought the deadliest U.S. tornado since 1947, the May 22, 2011 Joplin, Missouri tornado, which killed 158 people and injured 1150. The preliminary tornado total from February 28 – 29 of 2012 is 30, making it the largest February tornado outbreak since February 17 – 18, 2008, when 31 twisters touched down. Yesterday’s Harrisburg, Illinois tornado was the deadliest February tornado since the February 10, 2009 EF-4 twisterthat struck Southern Oklahoma near Ardmore, killing eight. The deadliest February tornado in recorded history occurred on February 21, 1971, when an F-4 tornado ripped a 202-mile path through Mississippi, killing 58 people.


Figure 2. By analyzing both the rotational velocity of the storm systems (the spinning of tornadoes has high rotational velocity compared to the surrounding storms) and presence of hail, scientists at the NOAA National Severe Storms Laboratory have developed a product that approximates the track of tornadoes, shown here for the February 29, 2012 storms. Image credit: NOAA Environmental Visualization Laboratory.

Violent tornadoes in February: a rarity
Violent February tornadoes are rare in February. The Tornado History Project lists eighteen EF-4 and one EF-5 tornadoes in the U.S. during the month of February since 1950–an average of one violent February tornado every three years. Part of the reason for this is the lack of warm, unstable air so early in the year. However, this year’s unusually mild winter has led to ocean temperatures across the Gulf of Mexico that are approximately 1°C above average–among the top ten warmest values on record, going back to the 1800s. Averaged over the month of February, the highest sea surface temperatures on record in the Gulf between 20 – 30°N, 85 – 95°W occurred in 2002, when the waters were 1.34°C above average. Yesterday’s tornado outbreak was fueled, in part, by high instability created by unusually warm, moist air flowing north from the Gulf of Mexico due to the high water temperatures there.

Heavy snow hits Upper Midwest
The same storm system also brought the heaviest snows of the winter to portions of the Upper Midwest, which has received scant snowfall this winter. Widespread heavy snow fell in northern Wisconsin, where Mincqua recorded 18 inches. South Dakota, Central Minnesota, and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula also received snow amounts in excess of a foot. The storm also brought moderate snows to Northern New England, with southern Vermont receiving more than 8 inches. The latest NOAA Storm Summary has detailed storm total accumulation info.


Figure 3. Snowfall amounts for the 3-day period ending at 7 am local time Thursday, March 1, 2012. Image credit: NOAA Southern Region Headquarters.

New tornado outbreak likely on Friday
The storm system that brought yesterday’s tornadoes and snow has moved into Canada and New England, and the threat of severe weather is minimal today in the Midwest. However, a new storm system is expected to form over Missouri early Friday and track northeastward, unleashing a new tornado outbreak over Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Indiana, and Ohio. NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center has placed this region in their “Moderate Risk” area for severe weather Friday, and is warning of the possibility of long-track significant tornadoes. Consult ourSevere Weather Page and Interactive Tornado Page to follow the storms.


Figure 4. NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center has placed much of Tennessee, Kentucky, and portions of surrounding states in their “Moderate Risk” area for severe weather on Friday. This is one level below the highest level of alert, “High Risk.”

Portlight disaster relief charity responds to the Harrisburg, Illinois tornado
Portlight is sending people into the Harrisburg, IL, area at this time in response to the tornado disaster there. They will be assessing needs there and surrounding areas. As usual, they will be focusing efforts on the un-served, under-served and forgotten. Please visit the Portlight Disaster Relief blog to learn more. Donations are always welcome!

Jeff Masters

from:    http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=2042