Test Recording @ Hill Street

One of my favorite guitarists--Warren Mendonsa here..aka blackstratblues
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TMR Salutes America's Number One Mass Murderer -- Rachel Carson

For those of you who can't quite place the name, Rachel Carson was an environmental activist best known for her work of fiction entitled, Silent Spring, in which she posited a world devoid of birds and wildlife because of man's use of pesticides.

That little work of fiction, which has become an anthem for the environmental lobby, single-handedly brought about the ban in this country, and throughout the world, of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, better known as DDT.

As a result of that DDT ban, more than 50 million people, mostly impoverished third world children, have died from Malaria.

And sadly enough, it was all a lie.

Going abroad? Don't be afraid to pack the cell phone

It's summer time. And you know what that means: Harrowing international travel with your cell phone.

One Doctor's 'Six Months In Sudan'

I only caught a few minutes of this story on NPR today, but the doctor hits upon the difficulty of going from a world of starving kids and living with a sense of urgency to deciding what to do when back home (in his case Toronto), e.g. go to the movies...
I still haven't successfully made the transition...
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Dr. James Maskalyk went to a contested border town in Sudan, called Abyei, with Doctors Without Borders. He treated malnourished patients and fended off a measles epidemic with limited resources. His six-month stint affected him more than he expected.

Myanmar Dissident Testifies at Trial

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — The government of Myanmar formally lifted the house arrest Tuesday of the pro-democracy leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, but she remained in detention facing charges that could bring her a five-year prison term, her lawyer said.

The house arrest was due to expire on Wednesday, but Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi had already been moved on May 14 to Insein Prison, where she is on trial on a charge of violating the terms of her detention by allowing an American intruder to spend the night at her home.

“She is free from that detention order, but really she is not free,” said her lawyer, U Nyan Win.

If she is convicted in court, he said, she would probably remain in prison rather than being given a new term of house arrest.

Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, 63, has been held under house arrest for 13 of the last 19 years. Her latest six-year term of detention was about to reach its legal limit and many analysts had viewed the trial as a means to extend it.

Those Who Make Us Say 'Oh!'

Peggy Noonan eloquent as ever..

A tribute to America's war heroes, past and present.

Children of the Nile

Here are a few pictures of the children I made friends with while my friends were rafting the Nile...
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"Adrift" in Uganda

Here is a picture of "Jeffrey,"the "Adrift"guide referenced in the NY Times article below, using his muscles to steer the raft filled with my friends..uvealblues

Wild on the Nile in Uganda

It is hard to blog about this article..because I was almost doing this exact thing!--rafting down the nile with the individuals mentioned here--the "Adrift" guides, Josh and Jeffrey. I spent a month in Uganda last August, with 5 friends. We did much of the adventurous activities mentioned here--safaris, gorilla trekking, the monkey forest, hanging out in the Sesse Islands.
I was all set to go down the Nile with my friends, when I got a call from my wife back home the night before nixing the rafting trip. (She was greatly influenced by two other very close friends--you know who you are).
I was able to transfer my ticket to a friend and I spent the day on the Nile playing with the local kids and documenting my friends trip, instead of experiencing the thrill of level 5 and 6 rapids...
But I do agree with the author, Uganda, is an incredible country!
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WHEN I showed up to go white-water rafting in Uganda, Josh, the Canadian rafting guide who stood barefoot in board shorts and looked like a hardier, hairier version of Brad Pitt, greeted me with a simple question: Wild or mild?

My advice, if you’re ever going to do this, is to choose wisely. Because the next thing I knew, I was upside down in an infuriated patch of the Nile River, a ceiling of white water above me, all those tranquil birds and flowers along the banks a violently disappeared memory and Josh screaming, “Dude! Watch out for the rocks!”

The Hidden Hunger

BISSAU, Guinea-Bissau
The most heartbreaking thing about starving children is their equanimity.

They don’t cry. They don’t smile. They don’t move. They don’t show a flicker of fear, pain or interest. Tiny, wizened zombies, they shut down all nonessential operations to employ every last calorie to stay alive.

We in the West misunderstand starvation — especially the increasing hunger caused by the global economic crisis —
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The World Bank has estimated that United Nations goals for overcoming global poverty have been set back seven years by the global crisis. It calculates that increased malnutrition last year may have caused an additional 44 million children to suffer permanent physical or mental impairment.

Yet one of the great Western misconceptions is that severe malnutrition is simply about not getting enough to eat. Often it’s about not getting the right micronutrients — iron, zinc, vitamin A, iodine — and one of the most cost-effective ways outsiders can combat poverty is to fight this “hidden hunger.”

Malnutrition is not a glamorous field, and so it’s routinely neglected by everybody — donor governments, poor countries and, yes, journalists. But malnutrition is implicated in one-third to one-half of all child deaths each year; the immediate cause may be diarrhea, but lurking behind it is a deficiency of zinc.
(..)
“Lack of iron is the most widespread nutrition deficiency in the world, and yet you can’t really see it,” he added.

In my column last Sunday, I wrote about women dying in childbirth. One reason so many die of hemorrhages is that 42 percent of pregnant women worldwide have anemia, according to the World Health Organization. And here in Guinea-Bissau, 83 percent of youngsters under age 5 suffer from iron deficiency.

Where Life’s Start Is a Deadly Risk

The pictures that accompany this story are quite poignant.
The article hits upon the key points of unnecessary deaths in health young mothers, lack of access to healthcare, brain drain, etc...
In the maternal wards of hospitals I have seen in Africa, the conditions are quite abysmal as pointed out in this article, but also highlighted is the fact that it is unknown how many mothers die giving birth at home. I have a friend who along with his girlfriend ended up adopting a young orphaned child whose mother died in the bush of Namibia. My friends had been working in a hospital there. As per the tradition of the area, women went out in the bush to deliver their babies by themselves. They were supposed to return in 3 days. However, when the mother did not return the village elders went out and found the mother dead and the newborn barely alive.
The girl is now a healthy and beautiful 10 year old girl, living in Holland with Andre and Judy.

BEREGA, Tanzania — The young woman had already been in labor for two days by the time she reached the hospital here. Now two lives were at risk, and there was no choice but to operate and take the baby right away.

It was just before dawn, and the operating room, powered by a rumbling generator, was the only spot of light in this village of mud huts and maize fields. A mask with a frayed cord was fastened over the woman’s face. Moments later the cloying smell of ether filled the room, and then Emmanuel Makanza picked up his instruments and made the first cut for a Caesarean section.

Mr. Makanza is not a doctor, a fact that illustrates both the desperation and the creativity of Tanzanians fighting to reduce the number of deaths and injuries among pregnant women and infants.
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There are many nights like this at the hospital here, 6 miles from the nearest paved road and 25 miles from the last electric pole. It is not uncommon for a woman in labor to arrive after a daylong, bone-rattling ride on the back of a bicycle or motorcycle, sometimes with the arm or leg of her unborn child already emerging from her body.

Some arrive too late. In October, a mother who had been in labor for two days died of infection. In November and December, two bled to death. Doctors say they think that more deaths probably occur outside the hospital among the many women who try to give birth at home.

A few minutes’ walk from the hospital is an orphanage that sums up the realities here: it is home to 20 children, all under 3, nearly all of whose mothers died giving birth to them.

(..)
The Global Perspective

Women in Africa have some of the world’s highest death rates in pregnancy and during childbirth. For each woman who dies, 20 others suffer from serious complications, according to the W.H.O.
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The women who die are usually young and healthy, and their deaths needless. The five leading causes are bleeding, infection, high blood pressure, prolonged labor and botched abortions. Maternal deaths from such causes were largely eliminated nearly a century ago in developed countries. In poor countries a mother’s death leaves her newborn at great risk of dying as well.

The Science of Spirituality

Here is a link to the entire series, encompassing the post below:
Is This Your Brain On God?

More than half of adult Americans report they have had a spiritual experience that changed their lives. Now, scientists from universities like Harvard, Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins are using new technologies to analyze the brains of people who claim they have touched the spiritual -- from Christians who speak in tongues to Buddhist monks to people who claim to have had near-death experiences.

Prayer May Reshape Your Brain ... And Your Reality

All Things Considered, May 20, 2009 · Scientists are making the first attempts to understand spiritual experience — and what happens in the brains and bodies of people who believe they connect with the divine.
The field is called "neurotheology," and although it is new, it's drawing prominent researchers in the U.S. and Canada. Scientists have found that the brains of people who spend untold hours in prayer and meditation are different.

Mango Buttermilk Smoothie

A nice recipe herethat should provide a good respite from the summer heat this Memorial Day -- lassi, in any vairiety has been a favorite since childhood for me...

9 Practical Ways to To Help Stay Focused

Good tips here...

Your attention is everything these days. As the media and the people in your environment will always find new ways to distract you from what's important, it's even more important today to maintain your focus.

By doing so, you remain to be "the eye of the storm," calm and focused. Being focused is more of an art than it is a science. Here are 9 practical ways to stay focused...

Dietary Fatty Acids and the 10-Year Incidence of Age-Related Macular Degeneration

Latest results from the Blue Mountain Eye Study

Results After adjusting for age, sex, and smoking, 1 serving of fish per week was associated with reduced risk of incident early AMD (relative risk, 0.69 [95% confidence interval, 0.49-0.98]), primarily among participants with less than the median linoleic acid consumption (0.57 [0.36-0.89]). Findings were similar for intake of long-chain {omega}-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids. One to 2 servings of nuts per week was associated with reduced risk of incident early AMD (relative risk, 0.65 [95% confidence interval, 0.47-0.91]). Protective associations between the intake of nuts and reduced risk of pigmentary abnormalities were seen among nonsmokers, participants with less than the median ratio of serum total to high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, and those with beta carotene intake greater than the median level.

Heidegger and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

An excellent review of what seems to be a interesting book. I say this not just because "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" is one of my all-time favorites, but also because, as alluded to in this review, I have probably spent 75% of my day today as a physician today "clerking" for insurance companies, instead of engaging in the cognitive and interpersonal elements of my profession, which is what I love...and why I went into medicine..and which is what I am able to do when I work overseas on mission trips...
I would much rather be looking (literally and figuratively)into my patient's eyes than at charts--filling meaningless data fields for insurance companies and their high-flying CEO's.

When Matthew Crawford finished his doctorate in political philosophy at the University of Chicago, he took a job at a Washington think tank. "I was always tired," he writes, "and honestly could not see the rationale for my being paid at all." He quit after five months and started doing motorcycle repair in a decaying factory in Richmond, Va. This journey from philosopher manqué to philosopher-mechanic is the arc of his new book, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work.
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While doing the work of a mechanic provides intellectual challenges and the intrinsic satisfactions of completing problems from start to finish, Crawford knows that working in the trades is seen as déclassé and too limiting for a college graduate. And then he goes on to show how stupid that viewpoint is.

The first piece of evidence to consider is a quote from the Princeton economist Alan Binder about how the labor market of the next decades won't necessarily be divided between the highly educated and the less-educated: "The critical divide in the future may instead be between those types of work that are easily deliverable through a wire (or via wireless connections) with little or no diminution in quality and those that are not." Binder goes on to summarize his own take: "You can't hammer a nail over the Internet." Learning a trade is not limiting but, rather, liberating. If you are in possession of a skill that cannot be exported overseas, done with an algorithm, or downloaded, you will always stand a decent chance of finding work. Even rarer, you will probably be a master of your own domain, something the thousands of employed but bored people in the service industries can only dream of.

In Pursuit of Elegance: 12 Indispensable Tips

Matthew E. May is the author of In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing and the ChangeThis manifesto called Creative Elegance. He spent nearly a decade as a close adviser to Toyota and works with creative teams and senior leaders at a number of top Fortune companies.

Question: How do you define elegance?
Answer: Something is elegant if it is two things at once: unusually simple and surprisingly powerful. One without the other leaves you short of elegant. And sometimes the “unusual simplicity” isn’t about what’s there, it’s about what isn’t. At first glance, elegant things seem to be missing something.

Pollution Can Change Your DNA in 3 Days, Study Suggests

Breathing in polluted air may wreak havoc on our DNA, reprogramming genes in as few as three days and causing increased rates of cancer and other diseases

via Guy Kawasaki

How to Wake Up and Instantly Achieve Something Everyday

Imagine this: you wake up and you instantly achieve something. You complete a goal, you make progress, you build momentum and you build self-esteem. You make it part of your routine and achieve something everyday, instantly.