And Al, for what it’s worth, I miss you here, too. Hope you’re recuperating well and you’re thinking of firing up that computer again soon.

Mischa, digging your new pic, lookin’ good, mon ami

Luv, Zen Lill

Whatever Cameron discovered during his dive into the Marianna Trench he is taking it to the top secret naval base Ulithi.

He has left Guam and that is where he will be stationed for the rest of his dives into the Trench.

http://www.pacificnewscenter.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=22165:video-ret-lt-walsh-calls-cameron-an-explorer-not-an-adventurer&catid=45:guam-news&Itemid=156
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What could that be? Got any ideas Howie? Whatever it is Microsolf co-founder Paul Allen’s yacht the “Octopus” has brought tons of film.

Peter

Spreading news about someone behind his or her back can make you look petty and shallow—like if you’re complaining to your spouse about someone’s poor fashion sense or nervous tick.

This is because much of the time, the only thing that gossiping accomplishes is hurting the reputation of the person being talked about.

But gossip doesn’t always fall into that “bad’ category—oftentimes it’s much more complex than that.

Say your friend has been alone for many years and tells you that she’s interested in getting serious with a new boyfriend, but you’ve heard through the grapevine that this particular guy has cheated on numerous past girlfriends.

Do you warn your friend? You don’t know for sure that he was unfaithful, and even if he was, it doesn’t necessarily mean that he’ll stray again.

So…gossip or don’t gossip?

The authors of a new study would say that sharing this type of information would help protect others and also may have a positive effect on your health because it falls under a category that they would call “prosocial” gossip.

To learn more about what that means and why they think it’s a good idea, I called the study’s coauthors, Robb Willer, PhD, an assistant professor of sociology at University of California, Berkeley, and Matthew Feinberg, a psychology grad student there.

GOSSIP CAN BE THERAPEUTIC

Instead of looking at gossip that’s intended to either advance the position of the gossiper (“My husband just got a six-figure book deal”) or damage someone else’s reputation (“John got promoted before I did only because he’s good-looking”),

the researchers wanted to investigate the type of gossip that warns other people about those who are selfish or untrustworthy.

To do this, they devised a series of experiments to see how and when people would engage in “prosocial” gossip.

In one experiment, researchers hooked up 52 undergraduate male and female subjects to heart-rate monitors and watched their reactions to two people playing a game.

They deliberately arranged for the subjects to observe one player cheating—and when the subjects witnessed this exploitative behavior,

they reported feeling frustrated and their heart rates rose, demonstrating stress, which of course is not good for your health.

But interestingly, participants’ increases in heart rate were calmed when they got the chance to slip a “gossip note” to a new player—a note warning him or her to be careful because someone else was playing selfishly.

And when asked how relieved or better they felt after sending the note, students expressed lower levels of frustration than before.

GO AHEAD AND GOSSIP

I asked Dr. Willer why he thought that passing along this gossipy information made such a difference to the gossiper.

He said that people tend to feel relieved by the idea that a selfish person has been “caught” and therefore will be less able to dupe or hurt others in the future.

In Feinberg’s view, we shouldn’t hesitate to gossip—nor should we feel guilty after we do it—as long as the gossip helps prevent others from being taken advantage of.

Sources: Matthew Feinberg, graduate student in psychology, University of California, Berkeley, and Robb Willer, PhD, assistant professor of sociology and psychology, University of California, Berkeley.
Listing Details

I need assistance Immediately. We can work our the details in private discussions separately or with whomever you have affiliations with.

Luc

ALEC IS EXPOSED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

The tragic and needless shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Florida has drawn national attention to Florida’s draconian “Stand Your Ground Law.”

Last week, CMD’s Brendan Fischer traced the trajectory of the Florida law, from the NRA to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to dozens of states across the nation.

See Brendan’s article here. CMD Director Lisa Graves then went on MSNBC to discuss ALEC’s role in propagating these measures and the corporations like Wal-Mart that stand to profit from increased gun sales.

See Lisa’s interview here. In a related matter, CMD filed a complaint with the Wisconsin ethics board last week asking them to review the manner in which ALEC “scholarships,” provided to legislators to attend meetings with corporate lobbyists, are funded by ALEC corporations and the propriety of other ALEC gifts, such as major league baseball tickets.

Today, Nobel Prize Winner and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman weighed in on the controversy with a shout-out to CMD. We thought you would like to see it.

This week we will unveil a new ALEC archive of open records requests that reveal even more of these connections.

We will continue our focus on the corporations bankrolling ALEC. Stay tuned and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Lobbyists, Guns and Money

Paul Krugman, New York Times

March 26, 2012

Florida’s now-infamous Stand Your Ground law, which lets you shoot someone you consider threatening without facing arrest, let alone prosecution, sounds crazy — and it is.

And it’s tempting to dismiss this law as the work of ignorant yahoos. But similar laws have been pushed across the nation, not by ignorant yahoos but by big corporations.

Specifically, language virtually identical to Florida’s law is featured in a template supplied to legislators in other states by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a corporate-backed organization that has managed to keep a low profile even as it exerts vast influence (only recently, thanks to yeoman work by the Center for Media and Democracy, has a clear picture of ALEC’s activities emerged).

And if there is any silver lining to Trayvon Martin’s killing, it is that it might finally place a spotlight on what ALEC is doing to our society — and our democracy.

What is ALEC? Despite claims that it’s nonpartisan, it’s very much a movement-conservative organization, funded by the usual suspects: the Kochs, Exxon Mobil, and so on.

Unlike other such groups, however, it doesn’t just influence laws, it literally writes them, supplying fully drafted bills to state legislators. In Virginia, for example, more than 50 ALEC-written bills have been introduced, many almost word for word. And these bills often become law.

Many ALEC-drafted bills pursue standard conservative goals: union-busting, undermining environmental protection, tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy.

ALEC seems, however, to have a special interest in privatization — that is, on turning the provision of public services, from schools to prisons, over to for-profit corporations.

And some of the most prominent beneficiaries of privatization, such as the online education company K12 Inc. and the prison operator Corrections Corporation of America, are, not surprisingly, very much involved with the organization.

What this tells us, in turn, is that ALEC’s claim to stand for limited government and free markets is deeply misleading.

To a large extent the organization seeks not limited government but privatized government, in which corporations get their profits from taxpayer dollars, dollars steered their way by friendly politicians. In short, ALEC isn’t so much about promoting free markets as it is about expanding crony capitalism.

And in case you were wondering, no, the kind of privatization ALEC promotes isn’t in the public interest; instead of success stories, what we’re getting is a series of scandals.

Private charter schools, for example, appear to deliver a lot of profits but little in the way of educational achievement.

But where does the encouragement of vigilante (in)justice fit into this picture? In part it’s the same old story — the long-standing exploitation of public fears, especially those associated with racial tension, to promote a pro-corporate, pro-wealthy agenda.

It’s neither an accident nor a surprise that the National Rifle Association and ALEC have been close allies all along.

And ALEC, even more than other movement-conservative organizations, is clearly playing a long game.

Its legislative templates aren’t just about generating immediate benefits to the organization’s corporate sponsors; they’re about creating a political climate that will favor even more corporation-friendly legislation in the future.

Did I mention that ALEC has played a key role in promoting bills that make it hard for the poor and ethnic minorities to vote?

Yet that’s not all; you have to think about the interests of the penal-industrial complex — prison operators, bail-bond companies and more.

(The American Bail Coalition has publicly described ALEC as its “life preserver.”) This complex has a financial stake in anything that sends more people into the courts and the prisons, whether it’s exaggerated fear of racial minorities or Arizona’s draconian immigration law, a law that followed an ALEC template almost verbatim.

Think about that: we seem to be turning into a country where crony capitalism doesn’t just waste taxpayer money but warps criminal justice, in which growing incarceration reflects not the need to protect law-abiding citizens but the profits corporations can reap from a larger prison population.

Now, ALEC isn’t single-handedly responsible for the corporatization of our political life; its influence is as much a symptom as a cause.

But shining a light on ALEC and its supporters — a roster that includes many companies, from AT&T and Coca-Cola to UPS, that have so far managed to avoid being publicly associated with the hard-right agenda — is one good way to highlight what’s going on.

And that kind of knowledge is what we need to start taking our country back.