It’s no secret that more and more children are taking medications to control their behavior. Although I long ago stopped subscribing to Time and Newsweek, both those magazines had practically annual articles asking whether we’re medicating our children to death. In the magazines, the anti-medication consensus is always that the fault lies with lazy parents or teachers who just don’t want to deal with child energy. However, having dealt with a lot of child energy myself, I can understand that people would want a break from that. I therefore don’t think the issue is child energy. I think it’s the diminishing number of options parents feel that they have available to cope with the energy.

What I hear from many parents who medicate is that they were unable to control their kids by any other means. But delve into that “any other means” concept, and you discover that these parents feel that their disciplinary options are limited to (a) time outs and (b) talking with the child about his or her feelings. The latter approach seems to be especially popular, because these parents feel its least damaging to their child’s tender psyche. The practical effect is that, when these parents are faced with a naughty child, they “punish” the child by giving him (or her) a long, private heart to heart with Mommy or Daddy. Considering that kids crave parental connection, whether it’s tinged with disapproval or not, I don’t see any incentive for a child “disciplined” this way to stop acting naughty. To the contrary — I see this kind of “discipline” as an invitation to be bad.

For the parents caught in this cognitive trap, where they unintentionally keep rewarding and therefore reinforcing the child’s bad behavior, medicine must seem like, not just the last resort, but the only resort.

I actually subscribe to a more old-fashioned approach which is to punish my kids when they’re bad, and give them lots of positive attention and praise when they’re good. (And no, Greg, because I know what you’re thinking — I do not beat my children.)

My punishments involve taking things away — especially taking away my attention. Whatever I decide — whether it’s throwing away the toy involved in the sibling tug of war, dumping the container of ice cream that would have been desert, canceling the play date — that decision is swift and final. The children do not get long, drawn-out faux Freudian analyses or heart to heart talks about Mommy’s feelings. Those all wait for later (assuming I do them), when they’re no longer connected with the naughty behavior, but are being discussed as a road map for better future behavior. And as I said, I praise the heck out of my kids whenever they do something good — so much so that probably 75-80% of what comes out of my mouth is positive affirmations about genuinely good behavior.

My approach (swift, fair disinterested punishment for bad behavior, coupled with constant, loving praise for good behavior) means that I have nice kids. The other benefit is that, because I verbalize their good behaviors, rather than their bad ones, the kids and I have a strong sense that they are nice kids. That niceness is the intellectual atmosphere that surrounds us. And all of this is done without benefit of medication….

(By the way, I’m not saying my kids or I are perfect. Far from it. We all irritate each other, and some days are definitely worse than others. They have some behaviors that seem so hard wired nothing will improve them, and I can do my yelling with the best of them. Overall, though, there’s a positive sense in our house, where I think they’re good kids and they seem to think I’m a good Mommy.)

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CARACAS, Venezuela (CNN) — As thousands of students marched in the streets in support, a Venezuelan television channel denied accusations that it was inciting violence against the government.

President Hugo Chavez’s administration shut down one station that was critical of him, and has opened an investigation into the remaining opposition station, Globovision.

Globovision’s director, Alberto Ravell, was unimpressed. “We are not going to change our editorial line that we are not afraid of the threats from this government,” he told CNN.

God bless this patriot. But he is up against certifiable left wing nut (and left wing democrat America’s good buddy) Hugo (that’s “Oo-go”) Chavez.

Perhaps Michael Moore can swing down there and do his next crockumentary on human rights under Chavez and why the people there are more free than the people in the USA. He’d win every freakin’ award that Cannes has to give out, and then some.

And where is “Jimma” Carter when we need him? Relaxing at Prince Bandar’s mountain retreat in Aspen? Come on, Jimma, Oogo is going through a tough time. Get down there and investigate so you can reassure us that he’s a legitimate freedom lover.

Ba-Ba Walters? Cindy Sheehan? Anyone???

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The AP reports today that the San Francisco Chronicle is bracing for major downsizing in the wake of its managing editor’s departure:

The San Francisco Chronicle’s managing editor is stepping down as the Hearst Corp.-owned newspaper braces for a round of deep editorial job cuts.

***

Rosenthal’s departure comes two weeks after the Chronicle announced a 25 percent reduction in newsroom staff, affecting all levels of editorial employees.

Management told the union it plans to eliminate 80 union and 20 management positions, out of a newsroom staff of about 400, unless the cuts could be made through buyouts and retirement incentives within 30 days.

Publisher Frank Vega said the measure was part of “continuing belt-tightening” to stem financial losses at the paper, which like other newspapers across the country is grappling with plunging print readership and the loss of advertising dollars to the Web.

The Chronicle had an average paid weekday circulation of 386,564 for the six months ended in March, down 2.9 percent from the year-ago period, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. Weekday circulation at U.S. daily newspapers overall fell 2.1 percent during the same period.

Before you weep too many tears for the possible demise of the old media, take a look at what now passes for publishable content in this once respected news organ:

It’s just one of those obscure little unreported conspiracy theory-ready hunks of floating White House detritus, a couple of foul-smelling documents no one really wants to touch and no one knows quite what to make of, probably means nothing, probably being misread anyway, all a bit overblown and strange and not all that important and not all that different than the way things are now.

Unless, you know, it’s not. Unless the violent twinge of queasy paranoia crossed with that uncontrolled bout of colon-clenching sighing you experience is deadly accurate and your radar for all things sinister and Rovean is right on target as you read about the delightfully titled National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD 51 and the Homeland Security Presidential Directive/HSPD-20, wherein it is calmly and furtively revealed that, in essence, George W. Bush owns your sorry ass.

Or, to put it another way, it looks like the Bumbling One just gave himself ever more power. Power to control and dictate the entire government, power to really spread the gospel of happy GOP incompetence, power to command the entire wobbly American universe should some sort of epic — or not so epic, as the case may be — calamity strike the homeland.

Twenty-five years ago, when my friends and I were all unquestioning young Berkeley liberals, we would see precisely that same type of paranoid, free-style writing in the old Bay Guardian. This stuff was always good for a laugh if we even bothered to read the front pages before settling down to the real business of the Bay Guardian — personal ads that were alternately amusing, pathetic, romantic, perverted, and generally much more interesting and intelligent than the rest of that paper put together. The sad fact is, once stuff that used to lurk on the lunatic fringes moves to the mainstream, the mainstream is in deep trouble, as the Chron’s fortunes plainly reveal.

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“Women: can’t live with them; pass the beer nuts” - Norm Peterson, Cheers

1. Cindy Sheehan

What is most striking about mentally-ill anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan’s retreat from the public square is that she seems surprised about something I’ve been saying for some time now: it’s about the ‘who’, not the ‘what’. The anti-war Left are really anti-Bush first, anti-Republican and anti-conservative second and then maybe, time permitting, anti-war.

Sheehan, just days ago, produced a blog denouncing the Democratic Party and calling for her supporters to do the same. The anti-war activist thought the cause would be better served by turning on the Democrats who have, at some point, turned their backs on them. She now knows the truth:

“The first conclusion is that I was the darling of the so-called left as long as I limited my protests to George Bush and the Republican Party. Of course, I was slandered and libeled by the right as a “tool” of the Democratic Party. This label was to marginalize me and my message. How could a woman have an original thought, or be working outside of our “two-party” system?

However, when I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the “left” started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used. I guess no one paid attention to me when I said that the issue of peace and people dying for no reason is not a matter of “right or left”, but “right and wrong.””

I recently wrote that true anti-war voters would not be supporting a Hillary or Edwards campaign - after all, their 2002 vote to authorize military action against Saddam Hussein has contributed more than most people to the anti-war nightmare that now consumes us all. Sheehan, for all of her faults, seems resistant to embracing the pandering of self-serving politicians. For this, she has been, according to her, “trashed” for her position by those who (in a sane world) would otherwise be rallying behind her.
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Ben Affleck was on the show of anti Christian Bill Maher and said that Romney would win the Republican nomination and then he went into an expletive filled rant on the Democrats because they passed a spending bill without time lines. Affleck said they did that because they did not want to go on vacation and have the president talk badly about them. Truth is, they did not want the bill to get in the way of them going on vacation. How would it look if they went on holiday without money for the troops? People would be demanding that they stay until they were able to get something done. They were not about to give up vacation and risk working more than 100 days this year. Affleck said one thing that is pretty interesting (if you can believe it):

“These (bleeping) people,” he said. “This is the (bleeping) problem with that. Democrats live in fear of basically being called cowards,” Boston Herald

His rant was directed toward the Democrats. My question is, if you live in fear of something doesn’t that pretty much make you a coward? If you live in fear of being called a coward, what does that say about you?

It is one thing to be afraid or to have fear, but to live in fear…

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McMaster University in Hamilton Ontario is the former haunt of Adnan el Shukrijumah, thought to be the next Mohammad Atta and head of a terrorist cell intent on attacking America with suitcase nukes … American Hiroshima. McMaster is also known as a ‘nest’ for many of the Canadian terrorists. Oh yes, McMaster has a 5-megawatt nuclear research reactor on campus.

Michael Devolin expressed “concerns to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) about McMaster’s nuclear reactor and all the Islamic professors employed there.” McMaster University President Peter George said ” … there were only two valid concerns about the reactor that were raised at the CNSC, both having to do with environmental safety, while all the others were racist and divisive.”

It’s amazing how over the past six years we have convinced ourselves that the destruction of New York’s World Trade Center, The bombings in Bali, The commuter train bombings in Madrid and the Transit bombings in London were all one-offs and did not represent a clear or imminent danger to our society. [snip]

So the environment has become the focus of all our worries and concerns and terrorism is a mere figment of our overheated racist imagination. Everyone knows that Islam is a religion of peace and why don’t we all stop persecuting innocent Muslims and pay attention to the real danger, that of global warming and climate change, blah, blah, blah. (Klaus Rohrich in “Climate change: The Cure for Terrorism“)

Jeffrey Epstein and Paul Williams with the America’s Truth Forum, say it is possible that a large number of the faculty at McMaster are involved in terrorist activities.

By the way, Adnan el Shukrijumah is described by Time Magazine as “an accomplished Arab Guyanese bomb maker and commercial pilot” (Time Magazine, August 23, 2004) who attended flight schools in Florida and Norman, Oklahoma, with Mohammad Atta and the other 9/11 hijackers. He has a $5-million bounty on his head.

But don’t worry about McMaster, it’s the environment we need to be afraid of. As Mr. Rohrich says, “If this weren’t so tragic, it would be funny.”

Jeffrey Epstein today:

Our current state of affairs certainly begs the question as to whether we can really afford to ignore costly lessons from history. One would think that we learned something from the murderous attack launched against us during the predawn hours of December 7th, 1941.

The first wave of 181 warplanes departed from six Japanese carriers to strike our fleet at Pearl Harbor and surrounding military airfields. At 7:00AM, the incoming squadrons appeared on the screens of the Army radar station at Opana. News of the steady-bearing “contacts” was immediately relayed up through the chain of command. However, senior officers falsely attributed those sightings to the anticipated echoes of returning American planes and never sounded the appropriate alarms – a costly assumption that contributed to the death toll of some 2400 servicemen.

Six decades later, three commercial airliners were commandeered by militant Islamist deviants and flown into their intended targets resulting in the deaths of 3000 innocent Americans. Once again, our nation was caught off-guard and paid a hefty price for underestimating an adversary’s resolve and capacity to do us grievous harm.

America is currently engaged in a deadly war that has the potential to last for decades and cost millions of innocent lives. Most experts agree that a far more deadly attack is imminent – a catastrophic strike involving a combination of tactical nuclear and/or radiological “dirty” weapons. Yet, Washington refuses to take legitimate actions to secure our homeland – that is, to properly identify the enemy, seal our borders and inoculate a number of terrorist-front groups that freely operate on our soil; subversive organizations that seek our destruction, spread seeds of hatred, fundraise for the enemy, support international acts of terrorism, recruit thousands of disgruntled “home-growns” and prepare scores of their followers to perpetrate acts of violence. (Jeffrey Epstein, President, America’s Truth Forum and Basics Project, via email)

I think political correctness is a clear and present danger for freedom loving people. We’re going to “PC” ourselves right into the crosshairs of the terrorists.

If the above information isn’t enough for you, here are some headlines that caught my eye:

Exit From Iraq Should Be Through Iran, William E. Odom, YaleGlobal, via Free Market News, The Islamic Reconquest of Palestine, Bud Simmons at Thoughts of a Conservative Christian

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I was in the car this morning at the dreaded 8:30 time, when there’s really nothing to listen to on the radio, news-wise, except for NPR’s Morning Edition. That’s the reason I found myself listening to a radio bit profiling the New Jersey mosque which three of the Fort Dix six attended. It was a fascinating story because, in common with most of the stories of this nature on NPR, it had a few consistent memes: the Islamic community now lives in fear of repercussions, Islam had nothing to do with it, and the only reason the accused could possibly have planned a slaughter of American soldiers was because they were upset about Iraq and Afghanistan:

There may be a tendency to believe we are being watched,” said Ismail Badat, who is one of the mosque’s trustees. He and his wife are founding members of the center and helped buy the two-story former Catholic Church that now houses the mosque.

“Frankly, it is possible we are being watched,” he said. “The congregation is open to anybody — you can come and go as you like. We don’t sanction anybody before they enter the doors. So people may feel they don’t want to be involved.”

Members aren’t just worried about Muslim extremists infiltrating their ranks; they are worried about undercover FBI agents coming in as well.

***

Afsheen Shamsi is with the New Jersey chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations. She said that after the arrests, Muslims in New Jersey were blamed. When Naseem Badat was a guest on a local radio station after the arrests, someone called in and threatened to blow up the mosque. A short time later, a Muslim woman in south Jersey was beaten by a white man who called her a terrorist. He was later arrested. Neighbors who live close to the Center asked the Badats to start screening visitors.

That has put nerves on edge.

“Every time a terrorist plot is averted, we breathe a sigh of relief because this is our home and this is our country, too, and we don’t want to see it come to any harm,” CAIR’s Shamsi said. “But relief is immediately followed by fear — a fear that there is going to be a reaction against the Muslim community.”

Concern about reprisals aside, what everyone really wants to know is what caused the six young men to want to attack soldiers at Fort Dix?

The Badats say the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq may well have been a trigger. The men tended to be quiet and kept to themselves. But they did talk about their frustration over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“All I can think of is their aggravation and frustration because of Iraq and Afghanistan,” Badat, who is Indian, said. “It is the only reason I can think of. Otherwise, there is no reason whatsoever, no reason why they would be involved in such things.”

MSM stories like the one above are so predictable, they’re almost parodies of themselves. Just once, I’d like to hear a story where the Muslims in the affected community are outraged — not because they are being scrutinized more closely — but because one of their own would have the temerity to turn on fellow Americans. I’d like to hear some of them say that, yes, extreme individuals could find a calling to violence in their religion, and that they’re working to educate people to understand that being a Muslim does not mean attacking the United States or Jews. I’d like them to say that it is a wonderful thing that America is working to liberate Muslims in the Middle East so that those poor benighted souls can enjoy the same freedoms, economic, political, religious and social, that American Muslims enjoy. I’d like anything but the usual “it’s all about us; we’re the victims” garbage that flows endlessly out of those representatives of the Muslim community that America’s MSM sees fit to interview.

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Politico.com reports that Fred Thompson will announce he is a candidate for President of the United States on July 4th. I can’t think of a better day for him to announce. However, Thompson’s camp says that is not true. He will announce in July but NOT on the 4th of July holiday. He doesn’t want his announcement to get lost in the news and celebrations of the holiday. He’s one smart guy.

The latest report says Thompson will announce on July 5.

Fred has my vote. He is not a career politician. He understands the war on terror. He understands the damage illegal aliens have on America and on our security. This is very good news!

[Discuss this post with Debbie Hamilton over at the Right Truth...]

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I owe this tip to the awesome Lifehacker website that covers computer based technology for the ultimate computer geeks (me).

You can restrict Google image searches to images of faces by adding the following &imgtype=face to the end of the search string.

Suppose you want to search for pictures of Paris. You go to google images and type in Paris which yields the following search URL: http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=paris.

To search for faces only as a sub-search add the image type hack and the result is mostly images of Paris Hilton as follows: http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=paris&imgtype=face

Neat. This is great for people who want to search in sub categories. Hopefully it will become an official feature and they will add more cats.

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I have one question about Flight 327 … If the incident with 14 Syrian “musicians” was completely innocent, why was 99% of the original report redacted? What’s to hide if their intentions were so innocent? Hmmm?

Airlines don’t want to admit these “dry runs” are happening, but they are. It’s bad news for airlines, Homeland Security and all the related organizations. I put my faith in the passengers and Federal Air Marshals. It is becoming increasingly clear that passengers are the last line of defense when flying.

According to the Homeland Security report, the “suspicious passengers,” 12 Syrians and their Lebanese-born promoter, were traveling on Flight 327 from Detroit to Los Angeles on expired visas. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services extended the visas one week after the June 29, 2004, incident.

The report also says that a background check in the FBI’s National Crime Information Center database, which was performed June 18 as part of a visa-extension application, produced “positive hits” for past criminal records or suspicious behavior for eight of the 12 Syrians, who were traveling in the U.S. as a musical group.

In addition, the band’s promoter was listed in a separate FBI database on case investigations for acting suspiciously aboard a flight months earlier. He was detained a third time in September on a return trip to the U.S. from Istanbul, the details of which were redacted. (Washington Times)

This is an immigration problem, a Homeland Security problem, and FBI problem, and certainly a problem for the individual airlines. When, please tell me when, will we take these dry runs seriously? Just today, “An American member of al-Qaida warned President Bush on Tuesday to end U.S. involvement in all Muslim lands or face an attack worse than the Sept. 11 suicide assault, according to a new videotape.” (read it at Peace and Freedom)

Annie Jacobson was on that flight and her reporting in Women’s Wall Street is not hyped, it simply states the facts of what happened. Read “Terror in the Skies, Again?” and read Jacobson’s book, “Terror in the Skies: Why 9/11 Could Happen Again”.

Anne Morse at NRO also has an excellent article on this “dry run”. Go read any of these links for all the frightening details.

[Discuss this article with Debbie Hamilton over at the Right Truth...]

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