Guest Opinion: Time to stop playing the race card
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JOE R. HICKS
Apologies were everywhere last week. And so was race.
Radio talk host Don Imus was a busy man, saying he was sorry whenever and wherever he could. As his drama unfolded, North Carolina prosecutor Michael Nifong was also trying to save his rapidly vaporizing career, issuing an apology to three young Duke University lacrosse players as the rape charges he had brought against them a year ago were dropped.
The apology strategies clearly didn't work: Imus lost his MSNBC cable show and his CBS daily radio show, while Nifong is facing charges that he engaged in serious prosecutorial misconduct, which could result in his disbarment.
OK, these guys aren't deserving of much in the way of sympathy. But what links both cases is the rank racial opportunism in Imus's firing, as well as in the Duke rape case, in which the Durham County district attorney shamelessly used race in an attempt to railroad three young men for his political purposes.
Remember the Michael Richards episode? In that case, America's civil rights establishment -- led, as usual, by Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton -- mobilized in an effort to sell the premise that a down-on-his-luck comedian had somehow become a barometer for our nation's race relations. The former "Seinfeld" star had hurled the N-word at black hecklers during his routine. Civil rights leaders contended that this showed how prevalent racism is in our society. In full mea culpa mode, Richards went on Jackson's syndicated radio show and apologized profusely, but Jackson simply used it as an opportunity to trumpet his claim, once again, that racism is alive and well in this country.
What remains of the once-proud civil rights movement justifies its existence by contending -- despite widespread progress -- that black people continue to live marginalized and victimized lives. This oft-repeated theme was the base for the ugly stew that was the reaction to Imus's slur, and it was the operating theme for Nifong as he set about attempting to ruin the lives of three innocent men.
Several decades ago, when I was head of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, I would have joined with Jackson and Sharpton with little reservation to call for Imus's demise. But somewhere along the way since then, reality intervened and I began to reject the view that America is a racist, hostile environment for people with my skin color. Further, I began engaging in the unforgivable sin -- rejecting the orthodox civil rights view of portraying blacks as victims.
The pattern of racial opportunism was well established by the time Imus offered his unsolicited comments about the Rutgers women's basketball team -- a team that recently competed in the NCAA championship game. In his usual gruff manner, Imus said that the players are a bunch of "nappy-headed hos." Let's stipulate that this was a bad idea, and that it was bad for the obvious reasons -- the team (not an all-black group, by the way) appears to be a collection of bright, articulate young women, undeserving of Imus's drive-by attack. It was also a bad idea because Imus, a veteran of politically incorrect commentary, must have known that such a comment was bound to draw attention from professional protesters such as Jackson and Sharpton.
Predictably -- like vultures awaiting the latest roadkill -- civil rights leaders began to clamor for Imus to be fired. To hell with sorry! The National Association of Black Journalists (sorry to be a pest, but shouldn't a group representing journalists take an objective stance?), along with Jackson, Sharpton and other black figures, turned aside Imus's repeated apologies. Protests were organized nationwide, often in front of CBS and NBC offices, and Imus took the risky step of appearing on Sharpton's radio show to ask forgiveness again, all for naught.
There is something surreal about someone like Imus prostrating himself before the likes of Jackson and Sharpton to save his job. The widespread assumption in corporate America is that these civil rights figures are "leaders" of the nation's black population. In reality, they have assumed this role through self-appointment and self-promotion. Polls have shown that only about 2 percent of blacks view Sharpton as their "leader." As Juan Williams pointed out in his book "Enough," when Sharpton ran for president in 2004, he couldn't muster enough votes to win a single primary and couldn't even carry his hometown of New York. Jackson also lost considerable luster in black communities after it was revealed that he fathered a child with one of his aides and it was alleged that he was "shaking down" corporate America for personal gain.
So, we are confronted with the specter of individuals who have little in the way of moral credibility, and have themselves made bigoted public comments (Jackson called New York "Hymietown" and Sharpton referred to Jews as "diamond merchants") now presenting themselves as arbiters of public morality and good taste in broadcasting. This, combined with the reality of today's hip-hop and gangsta rap CDs and videos, which commonly use bigoted, misogynistic lyrics that make the assault on Imus appear hypocritical in the extreme. The phrase "them's some nappy-headed hos" pales in comparison to rap lyrics that debase women and glorify the "thug life" in ways that trouble all but the most crass among us.
This is more than just a double standard; it is an agenda of racial opportunism that promotes the view that blacks are powerless victims of white racism. In this view, blacks are always in need of government intervention to save them from white hostility.
This is the view that Nifong exploited in his narrow quest for political survival. Throwing aside the principle of "innocent until proven guilty," Nifong campaigned hard in the black community, making it clear that he viewed the three [white] men -- Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty and David Evans -- as guilty of the alleged rape, and referring to the Duke team as privileged "hooligans." The jury to which Nifong played was the black community of Durham. This strategy worked; he was re-elected.
While justice was finally served up in the Duke case, what was accomplished by Imus's firing? Jackson and Sharpton may have gained another notch on their civil rights belts, and an over-the-hill shock jock is standing in the unemployment line, but the plight of black urban communities remains untouched. Poor parenting is still taking place, cultural rot is still afflicting the lives of black urban dwellers, disproportionate fatherlessness is still a reality, and bad schools as well as high levels of crime are still facts of black urban life everywhere.
It's easy to tackle a doddering old radio show host who has said something patently stupid. But it's far more challenging to address things that are real problems for real people. Most urban dwellers couldn't have picked Imus out of a lineup if their life depended on it. It's no wonder that some critics, like me, argue that figures such as Jackson and Sharpton, among others of their ilk, are dinosaurs fighting only to maintain a patina of relevance.
As comedian Bill Cosby has observed: "There are people that want you to remain in a hole, and they rejoice in your hopelessness because they have jobs mismanaging you. However, your job is not becoming victims. We have to rise up and fight on all levels to succeed." Amen, brother Cosby.
Joe R. Hicks is a social critic, vice president of Community Advocates Inc. and a radio talk show host in Los Angeles.
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Thursday, April 12, 2007
T-Rex Protein found inside bone, collagen = similar to chicken, frog, newt!
Original Protein Found in Tissue Taken From Tyrannosaurus Rex
09:59 PM, April 12th 2007
by Alex Radulescu
A North Carolina State University researcher and her colleagues at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center found out when they confirmed the existence of protein in soft tissue recovered from the bone of a 68 million-year-old T. rex. Their results may both change the way that people think about fossil preservation and present a new method for studying diseases such as cancer.
Dr. Mary Schweitzer, assistant professor of paleontology at NC State with a joint appointment at the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences, had previously discovered soft tissue in the leg bone of a T. rex recovered in 2003 from the Hell Creek formation in Montana.
After her own chemical and molecular analyses of the tissue indicated that original protein fragments might be preserved, she turned to colleagues Dr. John Asara, director of the mass spectrometry core facility at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and instructor in pathology at Harvard Medical School and co-author Dr. Lewis Cantley, to see if they could provide the "nail in the coffin" that would confirm her suspicions. That nail would be sequence – the amino acid 'letters' used to make collagen, a fibrous protein found in bone.
Schweitzer's findings – and those of her colleagues – appear in the April 13 edition of the journal Science.
Bone is a composite material, consisting of both protein and mineral. When minerals are removed from modern bone, a collagen matrix – fibrous, resilient material that gives the bone its structure and flexibility – is left behind. When Schweitzer demineralized the T. rex bone, she was surprised to find such a matrix, because current theories of fossilization held that no original organic material could survive that long.
To see if the material had the characteristic cross-banded "stripes" that indicate collagen, Schweitzer and her colleagues examined the resultant soft tissue with both an electron microscope and atomic force microscopy. They then tested it against various antibodies that are known to react with collagen.
"We looked for collagen because it's plentiful, it's durable, and it has been recovered from other fossil materials, although none as old as this T. rex," Schweitzer says. "It's also a relatively easy molecule to identify, and it's not something that any microbes living in the immediate environment could produce. So identifying collagen in the soft tissue would indicate that it is original to the T. rex – that the tissue contains remnants of the molecules produced by the dinosaur, though highly altered."
But the evidence that Schweitzer had managed to find for the existence of collagen, while strongly suggestive, was not definitive. Fortunately, a mass spectrometry technique developed for studying low-level proteins in human diseases in Asara's mass spectrometry core facility was able to do what hadn't been possible before: provide the sequence of a 68 million-year-old protein and thus identify it.
Mass spectrometry measures the mass to charge ratio of individual molecules (peptides) that have been charged, identifying them by weight. Peptide fragmentation patterns reveal the amino acid sequence. The advantage of this method is that it extremely sensitive and can be used in cases where only very small amounts of material are available for analysis. That was definitely true of the T. rex sample, which only produced a miniscule amount of remnant protein, and the protein was in a mixture of other material that had remained after the extraction process.
Asara first applied the method to modern ostrich and then to 160,000- 600,000 year-old mastodon to demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of their method while sequencing novel sequences unique to mastodon. Then he successfully sequenced the dinosaur protein, identifying the amino acids and confirming that the material from the T. rex was collagen. When the researchers compared the collagen sequences to a database that contains existing sequences from modern species, they found that the T. rex sequence had similarities to those of chicken, frog and newt.
"The similarity to chicken is definitely what we would expect given the relationship between modern birds and dinosaurs," Schweitzer says. "From a paleo standpoint, sequence data really is the nail in the coffin that confirms the preservation of these tissues. This data will help us learn more about dinosaurs' evolutionary relationships, about how preservation happens, and about how molecules degrade over time, which could also have some important medical implications for treating disease."
09:59 PM, April 12th 2007
by Alex Radulescu
A North Carolina State University researcher and her colleagues at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center found out when they confirmed the existence of protein in soft tissue recovered from the bone of a 68 million-year-old T. rex. Their results may both change the way that people think about fossil preservation and present a new method for studying diseases such as cancer.
Dr. Mary Schweitzer, assistant professor of paleontology at NC State with a joint appointment at the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences, had previously discovered soft tissue in the leg bone of a T. rex recovered in 2003 from the Hell Creek formation in Montana.
After her own chemical and molecular analyses of the tissue indicated that original protein fragments might be preserved, she turned to colleagues Dr. John Asara, director of the mass spectrometry core facility at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and instructor in pathology at Harvard Medical School and co-author Dr. Lewis Cantley, to see if they could provide the "nail in the coffin" that would confirm her suspicions. That nail would be sequence – the amino acid 'letters' used to make collagen, a fibrous protein found in bone.
Schweitzer's findings – and those of her colleagues – appear in the April 13 edition of the journal Science.
Bone is a composite material, consisting of both protein and mineral. When minerals are removed from modern bone, a collagen matrix – fibrous, resilient material that gives the bone its structure and flexibility – is left behind. When Schweitzer demineralized the T. rex bone, she was surprised to find such a matrix, because current theories of fossilization held that no original organic material could survive that long.
To see if the material had the characteristic cross-banded "stripes" that indicate collagen, Schweitzer and her colleagues examined the resultant soft tissue with both an electron microscope and atomic force microscopy. They then tested it against various antibodies that are known to react with collagen.
"We looked for collagen because it's plentiful, it's durable, and it has been recovered from other fossil materials, although none as old as this T. rex," Schweitzer says. "It's also a relatively easy molecule to identify, and it's not something that any microbes living in the immediate environment could produce. So identifying collagen in the soft tissue would indicate that it is original to the T. rex – that the tissue contains remnants of the molecules produced by the dinosaur, though highly altered."
But the evidence that Schweitzer had managed to find for the existence of collagen, while strongly suggestive, was not definitive. Fortunately, a mass spectrometry technique developed for studying low-level proteins in human diseases in Asara's mass spectrometry core facility was able to do what hadn't been possible before: provide the sequence of a 68 million-year-old protein and thus identify it.
Mass spectrometry measures the mass to charge ratio of individual molecules (peptides) that have been charged, identifying them by weight. Peptide fragmentation patterns reveal the amino acid sequence. The advantage of this method is that it extremely sensitive and can be used in cases where only very small amounts of material are available for analysis. That was definitely true of the T. rex sample, which only produced a miniscule amount of remnant protein, and the protein was in a mixture of other material that had remained after the extraction process.
Asara first applied the method to modern ostrich and then to 160,000- 600,000 year-old mastodon to demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of their method while sequencing novel sequences unique to mastodon. Then he successfully sequenced the dinosaur protein, identifying the amino acids and confirming that the material from the T. rex was collagen. When the researchers compared the collagen sequences to a database that contains existing sequences from modern species, they found that the T. rex sequence had similarities to those of chicken, frog and newt.
"The similarity to chicken is definitely what we would expect given the relationship between modern birds and dinosaurs," Schweitzer says. "From a paleo standpoint, sequence data really is the nail in the coffin that confirms the preservation of these tissues. This data will help us learn more about dinosaurs' evolutionary relationships, about how preservation happens, and about how molecules degrade over time, which could also have some important medical implications for treating disease."
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
The Science of Lasting Happiness
The Science of Lasting Happiness
Through controlled experiments, Sonja Lyubomirsky explores ways to beat the genetic set point for happiness. Staying in high spirits, she finds, is hard work
By Marina Krakovsky
Found through experiments that exercises in gratitude, kindness and optimism can make people happier--but only if they keep doing them.
Sees an American preoccupation with happiness (she left Moscow at age 9).
Of unrealistic expectations in the U.S. that happiness should be easy: "It's the American quick-fix obsession."
Skeptical of self-help books offering empirically untested advice, she wrote her own book, The How of Happiness, due out in 2008.
The day I meet Sonja Lyubomirsky, she keeps getting calls from her Toyota Prius dealer. When she finally picks up, she is excited by the news: she can buy the car she wants in two days. Lyubomirsky wonders if her enthusiasm might come across as materialism, but I understand that she is buying an experience as much as a possession. The hybrid will be gentler on the environment, and a California state law letting some hybrids use the carpool lane promises a faster commute between her coastal Santa Monica home and her job at the University of California, Riverside, some 70 miles inland.
Two weeks later, in late January, the 40-year-old Lyubomirsky, who smiles often and seems to approach life with zest and good humor, reports that she is "totally loving the Prius." But will the feeling wear off soon after the new-car smell, or will it last, making a naturally happy person even more so?
An experimental psychologist investigating the possibility of lasting happiness, Lyubomirsky understands far better than most of us the folly of pinning our hopes on a new car--or on any good fortune that comes our way. We tend to adapt, quickly returning to our usual level of happiness. The classic example of such "hedonic adaptation" comes from a 1970s study of lottery winners, who a year after their windfall ended up no happier than nonwinners. Hedonic adaptation helps to explain why even changes in major life circumstances--such as income, marriage, physical health and where we live--do so little to boost our overall happiness. Not only that, but studies of twins and adoptees have shown that about 50 percent of each person's happiness is determined from birth. This "genetic set point" alone makes the happiness glass look half empty, because any upward swing in happiness seems doomed to fall back to near your baseline.
"There's been a tension in the field," explains Lyubomirsky's main collaborator, psychologist Kennon M. Sheldon of the University of Missouri-Columbia. "Some people were assuming you can affect happiness if, for example, you picked the right goals, but there was all this literature that suggested it was impossible, that what goes up must come down."
Lyubomirsky, Sheldon and another psychologist, David A. Schkade of the University of California, San Diego, put the existing findings together into a simple pie chart showing what determines happiness. Half the pie is the genetic set point. The smallest slice is circumstances, which explain only about 10 percent of people's differences in happiness. So what is the remaining 40 percent? "Because nobody had put it together before, that's unexplained," Lyubomirsky says. But she believes that when you take away genes and circumstances, what is left besides error must be "intentional activity," mental and behavioral strategies to counteract adaptation's downward pull.
Lyubomirsky has been studying these activities in hopes of finding out whether and how people can stay above their set point. In theory, that is possible in much the same way regular diet and exercise can keep athletes' weight below their genetic set points. But before Lyubomirsky began, there was "a huge vacuum of research on how to increase happiness," she says. The lottery study in particular "made people shy away from interventions," explains eminent University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin E. P. Seligman, the father of positive psychology and a mentor to Lyubomirsky. When science had scrutinized happiness at all, it was mainly through correlational studies, which cannot tell what came first--the happiness or what it is linked to--let alone determine the cause and effect. Finding out that individuals with strong social ties are more satisfied with their lives than loners, for example, begs the question of whether friends make us happier or whether happy people are simply likelier to seek and attract friends.
Lyubomirsky began studying happiness as a graduate student in 1989 after an intriguing conversation with her adviser, Stanford University psychologist Lee D. Ross, who told her about a remarkably happy friend who had lost both parents to the Holocaust. Ross explains it this way: "For this person, the meaning of the Holocaust was that it was indecent or inappropriate to be unhappy about trivial things--and that one should strive to find joy in life and human relationships." Psychologists have long known that different people can see and think about the same events in different ways, but they had done little research on how these interpretations affect well-being.
So Lyubomirsky had to lay some groundwork before she could go into the lab. Back then, happiness was "a fuzzy, unscientific topic," she says, and although no instrument yet exists for giving perfectly valid, reliable and precise readings of someone's happiness from session to session, Lyubomirsky has brought scientific rigor to the emerging field. From her firm belief that it is each person's self-reported happiness that matters, she developed a four-question Subjective Happiness Scale. Lyubomirsky's working definition of happiness--"a joyful, contented life"--gets at both the feelings and judgments necessary for overall happiness. (If a sleep-deprived new mom feels fulfilled but frazzled, and an aimless party girl feels empty despite loads of fun, neither would consider herself truly happy.) To this day, she rarely sees her studies' participants; they do most exercises out in the real world and answer detailed questionnaires on the computer, often from home. To assess subjects' efforts and honesty, she uses several cross-checks, such as timing them as they complete the questionnaires.
The research needed to answer questions about lasting happiness is costly, because studies need to follow a sizable group of people over a long time. Two and a half years ago Lyubomirsky and Sheldon received a five-year, $1-million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to do just that. Investigators have no shortage of possible strategies to test, with happiness advice coming "from the Buddha to Tony Robbins," as Seligman puts it. So Lyubomirsky started with three promising strategies: kindness, gratitude and optimism--all of which past research had linked with happiness.
Her aim is not merely to confirm the strategies' effectiveness but to gain insights into how happiness works. For example, conventional wisdom suggests keeping a daily gratitude journal. But one study revealed that those who had been assigned to do that ended up less happy than those who had to count their blessings only once a week. Lyubomirsky therefore confirmed her hunch that timing is important. So is variety, it turned out: a kindness intervention found that participants told to vary their good deeds ended up happier than those forced into a kindness rut. Lyubomirsky is also asking about mediators: Why, for example, does acting kind make you happier? "I'm a basic researcher, not an applied researcher, so I'm interested not so much in the strategies but in how they work and what goes on behind the scenes," she explains.
Initial results with the interventions have been promising, but sustaining them is tough. Months after a study is over, the people who have stopped the exercises show a drop in happiness. Like a drug or a diet, the exercises work only if you stick with them. Instilling habits is crucial. Another key: "fit," or how well the exercise matches the person. If sitting down to imagine your best possible self (an optimism exercise) feels contrived, you will be less likely to do it.
The biggest factor may be getting over the idea that happiness is fixed--and realizing that sustained effort can boost it. "A lot of people don't apply the notion of effort to their emotional lives," Lyubomirsky declares, "but the effort it takes is enormous."
Through controlled experiments, Sonja Lyubomirsky explores ways to beat the genetic set point for happiness. Staying in high spirits, she finds, is hard work
By Marina Krakovsky
Found through experiments that exercises in gratitude, kindness and optimism can make people happier--but only if they keep doing them.
Sees an American preoccupation with happiness (she left Moscow at age 9).
Of unrealistic expectations in the U.S. that happiness should be easy: "It's the American quick-fix obsession."
Skeptical of self-help books offering empirically untested advice, she wrote her own book, The How of Happiness, due out in 2008.
The day I meet Sonja Lyubomirsky, she keeps getting calls from her Toyota Prius dealer. When she finally picks up, she is excited by the news: she can buy the car she wants in two days. Lyubomirsky wonders if her enthusiasm might come across as materialism, but I understand that she is buying an experience as much as a possession. The hybrid will be gentler on the environment, and a California state law letting some hybrids use the carpool lane promises a faster commute between her coastal Santa Monica home and her job at the University of California, Riverside, some 70 miles inland.
Two weeks later, in late January, the 40-year-old Lyubomirsky, who smiles often and seems to approach life with zest and good humor, reports that she is "totally loving the Prius." But will the feeling wear off soon after the new-car smell, or will it last, making a naturally happy person even more so?
An experimental psychologist investigating the possibility of lasting happiness, Lyubomirsky understands far better than most of us the folly of pinning our hopes on a new car--or on any good fortune that comes our way. We tend to adapt, quickly returning to our usual level of happiness. The classic example of such "hedonic adaptation" comes from a 1970s study of lottery winners, who a year after their windfall ended up no happier than nonwinners. Hedonic adaptation helps to explain why even changes in major life circumstances--such as income, marriage, physical health and where we live--do so little to boost our overall happiness. Not only that, but studies of twins and adoptees have shown that about 50 percent of each person's happiness is determined from birth. This "genetic set point" alone makes the happiness glass look half empty, because any upward swing in happiness seems doomed to fall back to near your baseline.
"There's been a tension in the field," explains Lyubomirsky's main collaborator, psychologist Kennon M. Sheldon of the University of Missouri-Columbia. "Some people were assuming you can affect happiness if, for example, you picked the right goals, but there was all this literature that suggested it was impossible, that what goes up must come down."
Lyubomirsky, Sheldon and another psychologist, David A. Schkade of the University of California, San Diego, put the existing findings together into a simple pie chart showing what determines happiness. Half the pie is the genetic set point. The smallest slice is circumstances, which explain only about 10 percent of people's differences in happiness. So what is the remaining 40 percent? "Because nobody had put it together before, that's unexplained," Lyubomirsky says. But she believes that when you take away genes and circumstances, what is left besides error must be "intentional activity," mental and behavioral strategies to counteract adaptation's downward pull.
Lyubomirsky has been studying these activities in hopes of finding out whether and how people can stay above their set point. In theory, that is possible in much the same way regular diet and exercise can keep athletes' weight below their genetic set points. But before Lyubomirsky began, there was "a huge vacuum of research on how to increase happiness," she says. The lottery study in particular "made people shy away from interventions," explains eminent University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin E. P. Seligman, the father of positive psychology and a mentor to Lyubomirsky. When science had scrutinized happiness at all, it was mainly through correlational studies, which cannot tell what came first--the happiness or what it is linked to--let alone determine the cause and effect. Finding out that individuals with strong social ties are more satisfied with their lives than loners, for example, begs the question of whether friends make us happier or whether happy people are simply likelier to seek and attract friends.
Lyubomirsky began studying happiness as a graduate student in 1989 after an intriguing conversation with her adviser, Stanford University psychologist Lee D. Ross, who told her about a remarkably happy friend who had lost both parents to the Holocaust. Ross explains it this way: "For this person, the meaning of the Holocaust was that it was indecent or inappropriate to be unhappy about trivial things--and that one should strive to find joy in life and human relationships." Psychologists have long known that different people can see and think about the same events in different ways, but they had done little research on how these interpretations affect well-being.
So Lyubomirsky had to lay some groundwork before she could go into the lab. Back then, happiness was "a fuzzy, unscientific topic," she says, and although no instrument yet exists for giving perfectly valid, reliable and precise readings of someone's happiness from session to session, Lyubomirsky has brought scientific rigor to the emerging field. From her firm belief that it is each person's self-reported happiness that matters, she developed a four-question Subjective Happiness Scale. Lyubomirsky's working definition of happiness--"a joyful, contented life"--gets at both the feelings and judgments necessary for overall happiness. (If a sleep-deprived new mom feels fulfilled but frazzled, and an aimless party girl feels empty despite loads of fun, neither would consider herself truly happy.) To this day, she rarely sees her studies' participants; they do most exercises out in the real world and answer detailed questionnaires on the computer, often from home. To assess subjects' efforts and honesty, she uses several cross-checks, such as timing them as they complete the questionnaires.
The research needed to answer questions about lasting happiness is costly, because studies need to follow a sizable group of people over a long time. Two and a half years ago Lyubomirsky and Sheldon received a five-year, $1-million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to do just that. Investigators have no shortage of possible strategies to test, with happiness advice coming "from the Buddha to Tony Robbins," as Seligman puts it. So Lyubomirsky started with three promising strategies: kindness, gratitude and optimism--all of which past research had linked with happiness.
Her aim is not merely to confirm the strategies' effectiveness but to gain insights into how happiness works. For example, conventional wisdom suggests keeping a daily gratitude journal. But one study revealed that those who had been assigned to do that ended up less happy than those who had to count their blessings only once a week. Lyubomirsky therefore confirmed her hunch that timing is important. So is variety, it turned out: a kindness intervention found that participants told to vary their good deeds ended up happier than those forced into a kindness rut. Lyubomirsky is also asking about mediators: Why, for example, does acting kind make you happier? "I'm a basic researcher, not an applied researcher, so I'm interested not so much in the strategies but in how they work and what goes on behind the scenes," she explains.
Initial results with the interventions have been promising, but sustaining them is tough. Months after a study is over, the people who have stopped the exercises show a drop in happiness. Like a drug or a diet, the exercises work only if you stick with them. Instilling habits is crucial. Another key: "fit," or how well the exercise matches the person. If sitting down to imagine your best possible self (an optimism exercise) feels contrived, you will be less likely to do it.
The biggest factor may be getting over the idea that happiness is fixed--and realizing that sustained effort can boost it. "A lot of people don't apply the notion of effort to their emotional lives," Lyubomirsky declares, "but the effort it takes is enormous."
Why It’s Difficult for Some Spouses to Apologize
Why It’s Difficult for Some Spouses to Apologize
By Nancy Wasson, Ph.D.
Is it difficult for your spouse to apologize and tell you that he (or she) is sorry? Or is it hard for you to offer an apology?
Some individuals can say “I’m sorry” easily while others can’t ever seem to choke the words out. When a spouse is reluctant to apologize, the partner inevitably ends up carrying emotional baggage from the resulting hurt feelings, resentment, and anger.
It’s often easier to offer an apology to a total stranger or a casual acquaintance than it is to a spouse. Usually, in those cases, whatever we have done—temporarily blocked the aisle with our shopping cart at the grocery store or bumped into someone in a hallway—was done unintentionally.
There’s normally not any feeling that one person did something to the other in a personal way. Instead, it feels like an accident, a momentarily distraction, or a misjudgment of visual space.
But when things happen between two spouses, an oversight or mistake can take on more personal tones and meaning. A spouse may harbor strong feelings that whatever occurred was deliberate and intentional.
When intense feelings are triggered and the emotional climate becomes either icy or raging, the offending spouse may retreat, not knowing what else to do. Or he (or she) may be afraid of doing the wrong thing and making the situation worse.
Some spouses view apologizing as a sign of weakness that brings about a loss of power and status. A spouse with this perspective may equate apologizing with admitting inadequacy and incompetence, and thus be reluctant to apologize for mistakes, failures, or misjudgments.
To others, it’s humiliating to have to apologize. They may have been ridiculed and criticized harshly by their parents when they made mistakes growing up, and as a result, they try to avoid admitting to mistakes and the unpleasant feeling that brings.
Accepting responsibility for personal actions and decisions is challenging for some spouses. They operate in denial, as though by not admitting fault they haven’t done anything “wrong.” It’s almost as though they are afraid of owning any inappropriate behaviors because then they might have to also take responsibility for other actions. So it’s just easier to avoid and deny than to admit responsibility and apologize.
If a spouse views apologizing as “all or nothing”—that the person who is “wrong” has to ask for forgiveness from the one who is “right”—that can also make the task more daunting. So can viewing the person who apologizes as the “loser” in an argument or dispute, while the one accepting the apology is the “winner.”
What Can You Do if It's Hard for Your Spouse to Apologize?
The following five tips offer specific actions that you can take:
Become comfortable with saying, “I’m so sorry for my part in what happened between us” or ‘I’m so sorry for my part in the misunderstanding.” That acknowledges two people are involved in what happens in relationship interactions and makes it less threatening for each to accept personal responsibility.
If your partner refuses to make an apology for behavior that deeply hurt you, ask her (or him) if she at least regrets what happened. Some spouses will find it easier to say “I really regret what happened at the party” than “I’m really sorry for my behavior at the party.”
Practice being the kind of partner that you wish you had. Apologize readily and model healthy behavior for your spouse. Be open about your feelings when it’s hard to apologize.
Say, “I don’t know why it’s so hard to apologize sometimes—but it is. This isn’t easy for me to say because I’d rather blame you than look at myself, but I am truly sorry for the things I said last night.”
You can’t control what your spouse decides to do or not to do, so focus on what you do have control over—your own reactions and behavior.
Write your spouse a handwritten letter (pen and paper—no emails) sharing your feelings and say that in order to move on, you really need some sort of acknowledgement of your feelings and the hurt you have experienced. State that it’s important for you to know your partner cares about your feelings enough to apologize or admit regret for what happened.
Remember that if your spouse can’t apologize to you, it doesn’t necessarily mean your spouse doesn’t love you. In some cases, it can indicate a callousness and indifference to the partner’s feelings. But in other cases, it can indicate a lack of relationship skills or unresolved individual issues.
Your best strategy may be to see if your partner will agree to some marriage counseling sessions to improve communication and intimacy. Then, address the issue in the counselor’s office where your chances of being heard and opening the door for positive change are greatly increased.
By Nancy Wasson, Ph.D.
Is it difficult for your spouse to apologize and tell you that he (or she) is sorry? Or is it hard for you to offer an apology?
Some individuals can say “I’m sorry” easily while others can’t ever seem to choke the words out. When a spouse is reluctant to apologize, the partner inevitably ends up carrying emotional baggage from the resulting hurt feelings, resentment, and anger.
It’s often easier to offer an apology to a total stranger or a casual acquaintance than it is to a spouse. Usually, in those cases, whatever we have done—temporarily blocked the aisle with our shopping cart at the grocery store or bumped into someone in a hallway—was done unintentionally.
There’s normally not any feeling that one person did something to the other in a personal way. Instead, it feels like an accident, a momentarily distraction, or a misjudgment of visual space.
But when things happen between two spouses, an oversight or mistake can take on more personal tones and meaning. A spouse may harbor strong feelings that whatever occurred was deliberate and intentional.
When intense feelings are triggered and the emotional climate becomes either icy or raging, the offending spouse may retreat, not knowing what else to do. Or he (or she) may be afraid of doing the wrong thing and making the situation worse.
Some spouses view apologizing as a sign of weakness that brings about a loss of power and status. A spouse with this perspective may equate apologizing with admitting inadequacy and incompetence, and thus be reluctant to apologize for mistakes, failures, or misjudgments.
To others, it’s humiliating to have to apologize. They may have been ridiculed and criticized harshly by their parents when they made mistakes growing up, and as a result, they try to avoid admitting to mistakes and the unpleasant feeling that brings.
Accepting responsibility for personal actions and decisions is challenging for some spouses. They operate in denial, as though by not admitting fault they haven’t done anything “wrong.” It’s almost as though they are afraid of owning any inappropriate behaviors because then they might have to also take responsibility for other actions. So it’s just easier to avoid and deny than to admit responsibility and apologize.
If a spouse views apologizing as “all or nothing”—that the person who is “wrong” has to ask for forgiveness from the one who is “right”—that can also make the task more daunting. So can viewing the person who apologizes as the “loser” in an argument or dispute, while the one accepting the apology is the “winner.”
What Can You Do if It's Hard for Your Spouse to Apologize?
The following five tips offer specific actions that you can take:
Become comfortable with saying, “I’m so sorry for my part in what happened between us” or ‘I’m so sorry for my part in the misunderstanding.” That acknowledges two people are involved in what happens in relationship interactions and makes it less threatening for each to accept personal responsibility.
If your partner refuses to make an apology for behavior that deeply hurt you, ask her (or him) if she at least regrets what happened. Some spouses will find it easier to say “I really regret what happened at the party” than “I’m really sorry for my behavior at the party.”
Practice being the kind of partner that you wish you had. Apologize readily and model healthy behavior for your spouse. Be open about your feelings when it’s hard to apologize.
Say, “I don’t know why it’s so hard to apologize sometimes—but it is. This isn’t easy for me to say because I’d rather blame you than look at myself, but I am truly sorry for the things I said last night.”
You can’t control what your spouse decides to do or not to do, so focus on what you do have control over—your own reactions and behavior.
Write your spouse a handwritten letter (pen and paper—no emails) sharing your feelings and say that in order to move on, you really need some sort of acknowledgement of your feelings and the hurt you have experienced. State that it’s important for you to know your partner cares about your feelings enough to apologize or admit regret for what happened.
Remember that if your spouse can’t apologize to you, it doesn’t necessarily mean your spouse doesn’t love you. In some cases, it can indicate a callousness and indifference to the partner’s feelings. But in other cases, it can indicate a lack of relationship skills or unresolved individual issues.
Your best strategy may be to see if your partner will agree to some marriage counseling sessions to improve communication and intimacy. Then, address the issue in the counselor’s office where your chances of being heard and opening the door for positive change are greatly increased.
Thursday, March 29, 2007
secret to relationships that work
I believe that we are all looking for the one person who makes us feel wonderful about ourselves, which is done specifically by seeing us for who we are and loving us for it.
Now...! The big, big lesson in this is that... your job, my lady, is to give him BACK that same amount of adoration/respect/LOVE - it's not just the women who need this to 'make their year!'
Can you do it, will your ego (self esteem) allow it? If not, it is time to get loving yourself in a serious way - loving= kindness, acceptance, positive self talk, etc. I believe that if my exwife and I would have done this for ourselves, and each other we would have still been married - and as happy as larks!
- I wrote this on groups.msn.com/divorcecaresupport
Now...! The big, big lesson in this is that... your job, my lady, is to give him BACK that same amount of adoration/respect/LOVE - it's not just the women who need this to 'make their year!'
Can you do it, will your ego (self esteem) allow it? If not, it is time to get loving yourself in a serious way - loving= kindness, acceptance, positive self talk, etc. I believe that if my exwife and I would have done this for ourselves, and each other we would have still been married - and as happy as larks!
- I wrote this on groups.msn.com/divorcecaresupport
How do we get over someone?
stage of abandonment (Shattering, Withdrawal, Internalizing, Rage, and Lifting), when your body/mind anxiously “searches for the lost object. ” During this stage (which overlaps with the others and can be quite protracted), you feel heartsick. You’re as strung out as a junky, except that instead of craving Heroin, you’re craving a love-fix. You’re constantly obsessing about your lost love, and it’s so painful and persistent, that you’d do anything to make it stop, only you can’t – the obsession is involuntary and creates real torment.
The good news though, as the writer above mentions, is that this phase passes.
In the meantime though it feels like you’re in permanent hell. People feel ashamed of how awful they feel and how persistent the obsession is – how powerful their abandoner has become in their lives. This shame only makes the withdrawal phase more agonizing, causing us to blame ourselves for being weak. We even wonder if “maybe this is why he left me in the first place!”
When we’re in withdrawal, especially at the beginning, we tend to fall into a game of “lost and found”. We anxiously wait for and “stalk” our lost love maybe we don’t actually follow him or her around (unless we’ve really lost it), but we may drive by his house at night to see if he’s home, check our voice mail 50 times a day, break down and call him, or otherwise try to track his activities. We wonder about his every thought, feeling, and intention. We feel powerless and helpless.
Eventually we stop tracking him or her, but we still don’t feel at peace. We’ve entered a morose period of just feeling lousy. We’re still not free.
(MY OPINION: frikking SAD but true... from self experience) but with every step we LEARN !! That we can't have a relationship alone, it takes TWO, and we only can control ourselves, not the "other" person that chose to abandon us and leave us heartbroken.
"How do we get over someone?
1) We need to validate the fact that abandonment creates an emotional crisis. Just as someone who has received a powerful blow to the stomach, we need to treat ourselves as having incurred a painful wound that requires all of our best self-care. We have broken our emotional ribs. Physician heal thyself. We need to take exquisite care of ourselves.
2) This begins when we stop shaming ourselves -- stop questioning our own strength. This love-sickness befalls the most independent people out there. It is not an indication of any shortcomings within ourselves, but just lets us know that we are human -- and that we are reacting to a very painful situation. If the tables were turned, our lover would be going through the very same thing." --Susan Anderson
3) Use this as an opportunity to gain emotional self-reliance. Nobody is going to care about us the way we can care about ourselves (and by now we’ve worn most of our friends out with our obsession, so we’re pretty much on our own). See this painful wound as an opportunity to become self-loving and self-caring. Yes, we learn how to love ourselves from this. The exercises in my book help you actually accomplish this thing called self-love during a time of emotional crisis.
4) Take your abandoner off of the pedestal. Ironically, the more they hurt us, the more we idolize them. The very fact that they caused us so much pain makes us want them more. This paradox is universal, and it taxes the empathy of our friends who say “How could you pine away for someone who treated you so badly?” Yes, it’s a paradox, but they would be doing the same thing if it happened to them. Now is the time to systematically de-elevate your abandoner. You can do this by writing about him or her in your journal with an eye for seeing him as ordinary, human, mortal, flawed (like the rest of us), “not the only one,” not right for you, etc.
5) Re-invest the energy inside of the pain (all of that withdrawal “searching for the lost object” energy) into new activities. Yes, NOW...you don’t feel like it, but you must do it. You must add new things into your life, make new connections with people, take a self-improvement course, sign up at the gym, ask for a raise, undertake a new daily regimen like daily journaling, or move to a better apartment, etc.
6) Don’t confuse self-love with self-indulgence. The emotional hunger you feel is real, but you must keep it from turning you into an alcoholic, love-aholic, or drama-aholic. You must keep it from ruining your diet, your credit rating, and your future relationships. In caring for yourself, do things that have substantial reward.
7) Start looking for new connections – but vow not to clamp on to any one person (yet). You’re looking for distractions – people to think about and to test your alter egos on, not someone to make a permanent connection to. That will come later.
8) The most important thing to keep in mind is that these efforts involve resolve – hard work and determination will win the race.
The good news though, as the writer above mentions, is that this phase passes.
In the meantime though it feels like you’re in permanent hell. People feel ashamed of how awful they feel and how persistent the obsession is – how powerful their abandoner has become in their lives. This shame only makes the withdrawal phase more agonizing, causing us to blame ourselves for being weak. We even wonder if “maybe this is why he left me in the first place!”
When we’re in withdrawal, especially at the beginning, we tend to fall into a game of “lost and found”. We anxiously wait for and “stalk” our lost love maybe we don’t actually follow him or her around (unless we’ve really lost it), but we may drive by his house at night to see if he’s home, check our voice mail 50 times a day, break down and call him, or otherwise try to track his activities. We wonder about his every thought, feeling, and intention. We feel powerless and helpless.
Eventually we stop tracking him or her, but we still don’t feel at peace. We’ve entered a morose period of just feeling lousy. We’re still not free.
(MY OPINION: frikking SAD but true... from self experience) but with every step we LEARN !! That we can't have a relationship alone, it takes TWO, and we only can control ourselves, not the "other" person that chose to abandon us and leave us heartbroken.
"How do we get over someone?
1) We need to validate the fact that abandonment creates an emotional crisis. Just as someone who has received a powerful blow to the stomach, we need to treat ourselves as having incurred a painful wound that requires all of our best self-care. We have broken our emotional ribs. Physician heal thyself. We need to take exquisite care of ourselves.
2) This begins when we stop shaming ourselves -- stop questioning our own strength. This love-sickness befalls the most independent people out there. It is not an indication of any shortcomings within ourselves, but just lets us know that we are human -- and that we are reacting to a very painful situation. If the tables were turned, our lover would be going through the very same thing." --Susan Anderson
3) Use this as an opportunity to gain emotional self-reliance. Nobody is going to care about us the way we can care about ourselves (and by now we’ve worn most of our friends out with our obsession, so we’re pretty much on our own). See this painful wound as an opportunity to become self-loving and self-caring. Yes, we learn how to love ourselves from this. The exercises in my book help you actually accomplish this thing called self-love during a time of emotional crisis.
4) Take your abandoner off of the pedestal. Ironically, the more they hurt us, the more we idolize them. The very fact that they caused us so much pain makes us want them more. This paradox is universal, and it taxes the empathy of our friends who say “How could you pine away for someone who treated you so badly?” Yes, it’s a paradox, but they would be doing the same thing if it happened to them. Now is the time to systematically de-elevate your abandoner. You can do this by writing about him or her in your journal with an eye for seeing him as ordinary, human, mortal, flawed (like the rest of us), “not the only one,” not right for you, etc.
5) Re-invest the energy inside of the pain (all of that withdrawal “searching for the lost object” energy) into new activities. Yes, NOW...you don’t feel like it, but you must do it. You must add new things into your life, make new connections with people, take a self-improvement course, sign up at the gym, ask for a raise, undertake a new daily regimen like daily journaling, or move to a better apartment, etc.
6) Don’t confuse self-love with self-indulgence. The emotional hunger you feel is real, but you must keep it from turning you into an alcoholic, love-aholic, or drama-aholic. You must keep it from ruining your diet, your credit rating, and your future relationships. In caring for yourself, do things that have substantial reward.
7) Start looking for new connections – but vow not to clamp on to any one person (yet). You’re looking for distractions – people to think about and to test your alter egos on, not someone to make a permanent connection to. That will come later.
8) The most important thing to keep in mind is that these efforts involve resolve – hard work and determination will win the race.
Friday, March 23, 2007
to Get rich think, chose a wealth type career, etc Ben Stein
To Get Rich, Just Follow the Instructions
by Ben Stein
Posted on Friday, February 16, 2007, 12:00AM
My little brain simply can't stop putting things into categories and seeking to find the patterns in life.
One of the many patterns I've noticed is that some people in the United States are much richer than others. We have a nation filled with opportunity: free education, easy investing, and cheap interest rates. And yet there's stunning financial inequality.
Disparity by the Numbers
According to my wonderful pal, Phil DeMuth, the top 1 percent of all wealth-holders in the U.S. own about 44 percent of the financial assets of the country, mostly in stocks and bonds. The top 10 percent own about 80 percent of the financial assets of the nation.
The top one-tenth of 1 percent of earners in the nation earn about as much as the bottom 40 percent. That is, about 130,000 high-income Americans earn as much as the bottom 120 million Americans combined.
To me, this is stunning -- almost frightening. But the real question it poses is, how did the ones at the top get there? Obviously, some do it through inheritance, and some have spectacular athletic or musical abilities. But what about the others? How did they get to the pinnacle of wealth?
Think First, Get Rich Later
I'll to offer some homely speculation. First, as the genius financial planner Ray Lucia would say, the first step is to have a plan to save. Without equilibrating assets and liabilities by accumulating lots of stocks, REITs, and cash, you won't get there
But I'm looking for something more basic here. How do you get the income to start saving meaningful sums?
Here's a clue: think. In 1996, when I started shooting "Win Ben Stein's Money," I was assigned a bodyguard named Yaniv. He was a former Israeli soldier, and as tough as old boots. We worked together happily for about 900 shows, and then we worked on "Star Search" together, after which we went our separate ways.
Occasionally, Yaniv would help me set up electronics equipment. He always did a great job because he read the instructions and then followed them.
Up the Ladder
Not long ago, I bought some new stereo equipment for my house and I called Yaniv to come over to install it. He showed up in an immense truck and told me what he'd been doing for the past few years.
He'd become a construction foreman on a jobsite building condos. He was so good at reading instructions that he became a contractor. He was so good at that, investors hired him to build still bigger buildings and paid him a good chunk of the profits.
Now he's building large developments and gets an even bigger share of the startlingly large profits. If a unit costs $300,000 to build, it's not unusual for it to sell for $600,000 to $800,000. Of course, you have to factor in the cost of the land, permits and legal issues, advertising, and the time value of money. But all in all, the profits are consistently immense.
Yaniv, a 32-year-old who still gets a thrill out of his Ford truck, is well on his way to being in the top 1 percent and, after that, the top one-tenth of 1 percent.
Outstanding in Your Field
How did he do it? He reads instructions. Yaniv reads building plans very carefully, then he reads permit applications carefully, and soon a building is done.
Beyond that, he reads life's instructions carefully, too. People make a lot of money building condos in Los Angeles even in an economic slowdown, so Yaniv entered a field that leads to making money.
If he'd continued on as a bodyguard he would've had fun, but he never would've gotten rich. And here his experience proves the great advice of Warren E. Buffett: It's better to be medium-good in a great field than great in a medium field. There are some fields where a lot of money can be made, and real estate development is one of them.
Law is another one, at private firms. Medicine -- if you're a surgeon -- is another, and finance is the highest-paid one. Starting a restaurant isn't a moneymaking field. Teaching and writing, except in the rarest of cases, aren't either. Acting is almost never highly paid, and police work never is highly paid.
Making the Choice for Wealth
Please notice a pattern: the most interesting and psychologically rewarding work is rarely the best-paid. So choices must be made.
If your goal is to be in that top 1 percent of wealth-holders, you have to do what Yaniv did. Follow the instructions to where the money is, and to where it isn't.
There's nothing -- absolutely nothing -- about people who have money that's better than people who don't. But if you want it anyway, simply follow the instructions as to where to find it. It's not that complicated.
by Ben Stein
Posted on Friday, February 16, 2007, 12:00AM
My little brain simply can't stop putting things into categories and seeking to find the patterns in life.
One of the many patterns I've noticed is that some people in the United States are much richer than others. We have a nation filled with opportunity: free education, easy investing, and cheap interest rates. And yet there's stunning financial inequality.
Disparity by the Numbers
According to my wonderful pal, Phil DeMuth, the top 1 percent of all wealth-holders in the U.S. own about 44 percent of the financial assets of the country, mostly in stocks and bonds. The top 10 percent own about 80 percent of the financial assets of the nation.
The top one-tenth of 1 percent of earners in the nation earn about as much as the bottom 40 percent. That is, about 130,000 high-income Americans earn as much as the bottom 120 million Americans combined.
To me, this is stunning -- almost frightening. But the real question it poses is, how did the ones at the top get there? Obviously, some do it through inheritance, and some have spectacular athletic or musical abilities. But what about the others? How did they get to the pinnacle of wealth?
Think First, Get Rich Later
I'll to offer some homely speculation. First, as the genius financial planner Ray Lucia would say, the first step is to have a plan to save. Without equilibrating assets and liabilities by accumulating lots of stocks, REITs, and cash, you won't get there
But I'm looking for something more basic here. How do you get the income to start saving meaningful sums?
Here's a clue: think. In 1996, when I started shooting "Win Ben Stein's Money," I was assigned a bodyguard named Yaniv. He was a former Israeli soldier, and as tough as old boots. We worked together happily for about 900 shows, and then we worked on "Star Search" together, after which we went our separate ways.
Occasionally, Yaniv would help me set up electronics equipment. He always did a great job because he read the instructions and then followed them.
Up the Ladder
Not long ago, I bought some new stereo equipment for my house and I called Yaniv to come over to install it. He showed up in an immense truck and told me what he'd been doing for the past few years.
He'd become a construction foreman on a jobsite building condos. He was so good at reading instructions that he became a contractor. He was so good at that, investors hired him to build still bigger buildings and paid him a good chunk of the profits.
Now he's building large developments and gets an even bigger share of the startlingly large profits. If a unit costs $300,000 to build, it's not unusual for it to sell for $600,000 to $800,000. Of course, you have to factor in the cost of the land, permits and legal issues, advertising, and the time value of money. But all in all, the profits are consistently immense.
Yaniv, a 32-year-old who still gets a thrill out of his Ford truck, is well on his way to being in the top 1 percent and, after that, the top one-tenth of 1 percent.
Outstanding in Your Field
How did he do it? He reads instructions. Yaniv reads building plans very carefully, then he reads permit applications carefully, and soon a building is done.
Beyond that, he reads life's instructions carefully, too. People make a lot of money building condos in Los Angeles even in an economic slowdown, so Yaniv entered a field that leads to making money.
If he'd continued on as a bodyguard he would've had fun, but he never would've gotten rich. And here his experience proves the great advice of Warren E. Buffett: It's better to be medium-good in a great field than great in a medium field. There are some fields where a lot of money can be made, and real estate development is one of them.
Law is another one, at private firms. Medicine -- if you're a surgeon -- is another, and finance is the highest-paid one. Starting a restaurant isn't a moneymaking field. Teaching and writing, except in the rarest of cases, aren't either. Acting is almost never highly paid, and police work never is highly paid.
Making the Choice for Wealth
Please notice a pattern: the most interesting and psychologically rewarding work is rarely the best-paid. So choices must be made.
If your goal is to be in that top 1 percent of wealth-holders, you have to do what Yaniv did. Follow the instructions to where the money is, and to where it isn't.
There's nothing -- absolutely nothing -- about people who have money that's better than people who don't. But if you want it anyway, simply follow the instructions as to where to find it. It's not that complicated.
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