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WOULD I LIE TO YOU? NEWS ∙ EDITORIALS ∙ SPORTS ∙ MOVIES ∙ RESTAURANTS ∙ CARTOONS

“QUIET NUMBSKULLS, I’M BROADCASTING

AUSCHWITZ SHIFTS FROM MEMORIALIZING TO TEACHING

By Michael Kimmelman-New York Times-February 18, 2011 OSWIECIM, Poland — For nearly 60 years, Auschwitz has told its own story, shaped in the aftermath of the Second World War. It now unfolds, unadorned and mostly unexplained, in displays of hair, shoes and other remains of the dead. Past the notorious, mocking gateway, into the brick ranks of the former barracks of the Polish army camp that the Nazis seized and converted into prisons and death chambers, visitors bear witness via this exhibition.

Piotyr Cywinski, Director of the Auschwitz-Birenau State Museum

Volume 29- March 2011

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IN THIS ISSUE: Cover: Auschwitz Shifts from Memorializing to Teaching…………..pages 1-6 Animal Conservation Dr. Michael Fox………………………………………………….pages 7-12 A Letter Received……………………………………………….pages 13-14 Amboseli Trust for Elephants…………………………………..pages 15-19 The Animal World………………………………………………………..pages 20-24 Human Interest Dr. Robert Fisch………………………………………………….pages 25-29 The Three Burials of Alston Andersen…………………………pages 30-31 Philanthropy Children’s Heartlink……………………………………………....pages 32-36 Art…………………………………………………………………………..pages 37-41 Entertainment……………………………………………………………..pages 42-46 Television…………………………………………………………………..page 47 Books Unbroken…………………………………………………………..pages 48-49 Movies 127 Hours…………………………………………………………pages 50-51 Obituaries………………………………………………………………….pages 52-54 Humor……………………………………………………………………...pages 55-65 Opinion….………………………………………………………………….pages 66-78

WOULD I LIE TO YOU?

Staff: Gary C. Fink, King & Editor in Chief (It‘s good to be King) Scott Paulson, Co-Editor, dissenting opinion Scandinavian Correspondent J Cheever Loophole, Counsel & Witness Protection Program Coordinator Jack Lindstrom, Illustrator & lousy Golfer Dr. Hugo Z. Hackenbush, Environment Editor JoAnn Fink, Censor & Queen in Waiting, Severest Critic Otis B. Driftwood, Overseas Correspondent Randy Evert, Occasional Minor Contributor S. Quentin Quale, Consulting Ornithologist Robin ‗Bob‘ Matell, Major Contributor of Minor Articles! Contact: Would I Lie to You? 612/337-1041 608 Second Ave S, #181 612/339-7687 fax Minneapolis, MN 55402 scott@gcfworld.com

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. Now those in charge of passing along the legacy of this camp insist that Auschwitz needs an update. Its story needs to be retold, in a different way for a different age Partly the change has to do with the simple passage of time, refurbishing an aging display. Partly it‘s about the pressures of tourism, and partly about the changing of generations. What is the most visited site and the biggest cemetery in Poland for Jews and non-Jews alike, needs to explain itself better, officials here contend. A proposed new exhibition at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum here, occupying some of the same barracks or blocks, will retain the piled hair and other remains, which by now have become icons, as inextricable from Auschwitz as the crematoria and railway tracks. But the display will start with an explanatory section on how the camp worked, as a German Nazi bureaucratic institution, a topic now largely absent from the present exhibition, which was devised by survivors during the 1950s. Back then they wished to erase the memory of their tormentors, as the Nazis had tried to erase them, so they said as little as possible in their exhibition about the Germans who had conceived and run the camp. They focused on mass victimhood but didn‘t highlight individual stories or testimonials of the sort that have become commonplace at memorial museums as devices to translate incomprehensible numbers of dead into real people, giving visitors personal stories and characters they can relate to. Those piles, including prostheses and suitcases, also stressed the sheer scale of killing at a time when the world still didn‘t comprehend, and much of it refused to admit to, what really happened here.

As Marek Zajac, a 31-year-old Polish magazine editor who serves as secretary for the International Auschwitz Council, pointed out: ―People who visited after the war already knew what war was, firsthand. They had lived through it. So the story of a single death did not necessarily move them, because they had seen so much death, in their families and in the streets, whereas the scale of death at Auschwitz was shocking.‖ The new exhibition would go on to describe the process of extermination, leading visitors step by step through what victims experienced, and end with a section on camp life, meaning the ―daily dehumanization and attempts to keep one‘s humanity,‖ said Piotr Cywinski, the bearish, red-bearded 39-year-old Polish director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.

―If we succeed we will show for the first time the whole array of human choices that people faced at Auschwitz,‖ he explained. ―Our role is to show the human acts and decisions that took place in extreme situations here — the diversity of thinking and reasoning behind those decisions and their consequences.

Prisoner's Suitcases

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So, we may pose the question, should a mother give a child to the grandmother and go to selection alone, or take the child with her? This was a real choice, without a good solution, but at Auschwitz you had to make the choice.‖ A barrack once used for sterilization experiments, one of the few left nearly undisturbed since the war, may be reopened, and a new visitor center, replacing the cramped one in use today, constructed to handle crowds. There will be few bells and whistles, Mr. Cywinski insisted, few if any videos or touch-screens in the main galleries, which would be impractical for masses of people. Nothing must overshadow the evidence of the site itself, he stressed. ―The more we use special effects,‖ he said, ―the more we draw attention away from the authenticity of this place, which is unlike any other.‖

Exhibition of shoes and suitcases

All or nearly all visitors will be shepherded by guides to field questions and keep crowds moving. That changes to Auschwitz must entail first of all calculating how to move increasingly large masses of people more efficiently, effectively and swiftly through the site is an uncomfortable turn of history lost on no one here. An explosion of mass tourism, dark tourism and education programs in Europe and elsewhere that send students abroad, has tripled the number of visitors to Auschwitz over the last decade. Some 450,000 people a year visited Auschwitz in 2000. Last year, that number was 1.38 million.

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The increase — most obvious during warm months in the long, crawling lines and oceans of visitors pouring into and out of the narrow barracks onto fleets of buses to Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, the vast extermination camp the Nazis built a few miles away — has strained an antique exhibition conceived when not many people came. Today, travel agencies in Krakow hawk daylong tours combining Auschwitz with the picturesque Wieliczka salt mine, with its rock salt chapel, sculptures and chandeliers. ―We must take into consideration that more and more people just drop by,‖ Mr. Zajac said. ―We may not endorse this tourism, but we don‘t charge admission. This is a cemetery. You don‘t charge admission to a cemetery.‖ The gradual passing of survivors has also meant that Auschwitz faces a historical turning point. ―Teenagers now have grandparents born after the war,‖ Mr. Cywinski noted. ―This is a very big deal. Your grandparents are your era but your great-grandparents are history. ―The exhibition at Auschwitz no longer fulfills its role, as it used to,‖ he continued. ―More or less eight to 10 million people go to such exhibitions around the world today, they cry, they ask why people didn‘t react more at the time, why there were so few righteous, then they go home, see genocide on television and don‘t move a finger. They don‘t ask why they are not righteous themselves. ―To me the whole educational system regarding the Holocaust, which really got under way during the 1990s, served its purpose in terms of supplying facts and information. But there is another level of education, a level of awareness about the meaning of those facts. It‘s not enough to cry. Empathy is noble, but it‘s not enough.‖ This is the theme to which officials here return often. Auschwitz, they say, must find ways to engage young people (some 850,000 students came last year), so they leave feeling what the director called ―responsibility to the present.‖

Flowers left for victims

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Exactly how that might be accomplished, if it can be, he admitted remains to be fleshed out in the questions and historical information presented by the exhibition and the tour guides. The very notion that people

increasingly see Auschwitz as ancient history, that the site, with its haunted ruins, might no longer speak for itself but needs to be made relevant to a new century — all this reflects a wider change in education and scholarship about the Holocaust, and also the special burden felt by officials at Auschwitz. ―Auschwitz is a pillar of postwar Europe,‖ Mr. Cywinski said, ―and the key to understanding today.‖ Each generation has gotten the stories it wants from the site. Under Communism, Auschwitz served as a national memorial to Polish political prisoners, who were the camp‘s first victims. Birkenau, where hundreds of thousands of Jews from Poland, France, Germany, Hungary, the former Soviet Union and elsewhere were murdered, lapsed into neglect, because it didn‘t fit the narrative. After the Berlin Wall fell, painful struggles between Roman Catholics and Jews erupted over what was in effect symbolic ―ownership‖ of Auschwitz, as a place of martyrdom and mourning, which led, among other things, to the creation of the international council, a board of advisors

under the authority of Poland‘s prime minister, which includes survivors, museum directors, clergy, scholars and representatives of Jewish, Roma and other groups. The international council could convene as early as June to review the proposed changes to the exhibition; an international competition would follow for a designer, and perhaps by 2015, Mr. Cywinski said, a new exhibition might open. The $20 million cost, including necessary preservation work on the buildings, would be paid by the Polish government. Mr. Cywinski is also looking to raise some $160 million more for an endowment to preserve the whole of Auschwitz and Birkenau, which requires millions of dollars a year in conservation. Germany has committed $81.5 million, Austria $8 million, and the United States pledged $15 million, so far. ―This may sound boring,‖ Mr. Zajac said, ―but I believe tending to this place is a debt to the victims. I sometimes meet students whom I met here years ago, now grown, who say they were changed by their visit, who became responsible people, dedicated to charity, leading ethical lives.‖ He said many of them feel compelled to return: ―They feel ashamed to admit this because it sounds weird, but they miss the place. They need to go back.‖ ―I share this feeling,‖ he continued. ―When I am at Auschwitz I start looking at the world and at my own life. I remind myself of what‘s important, which is so easy to forget. In the kingdom of death you can find the meaning of life. At the biggest cemetery in the world I know what I live for.‖

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Animal conservation

Hi Gary---I hope this finds you well. We are getting our home together slowly after Deanna's father passed on and her mother went into assisted living after living here with us for a few years in Golden Valley. If you are up for an English-style tea time some time, come over with your lovely wife and see how Fox & Krantz do the dance! I wanted to share my little tiff with the Star Tribune and the Martha Stewart empire/juggernaut with you, (See attachment) along with Dr. Sugamaran's regular daliy animal treatment report which you have so generously helped continue. Cheers, Michael Dr.Michael W. Fox Veterinarian, bioethicist, and syndicated columnist. website: http://www.twobitdog.com/DrFox/

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Martha Stewart IS ―MARTHA STEWART LIVING‖ GOOD FOR ANIMALS? By Dr. Michael W. Fox* In October 2010 my local newspaper dropped my syndicated Animal Doctor column and replaced it with a new column by a writer with no veterinary or animal-behavior science background -- only the media touted title of Martha Stewart‘s ―Resident Pet Expert.‖ So I made my first visit to Martha Stewart‘s website and immediately found and read the lead article on her pet section, ―Pet Food Basics.‖ But the article (dated 1994) was seriously outdated, and my interest in what kinds of pet foods and pet supplies were being promoted by Ms. Stewart was piqued. I found that Martha promotes just one mega brand of manufactured dog foods that contain such ingredients as animal digest, poultry byproduct meal, sugar, propylene glycol, Red Dye 40 (as well as Yellow 6 and Blue 2); with even wheat flour, soy bean hulls, soy protein isolate, soy protein concentrate and soy bean meal in the cat kibble. This kind of manufactured diet for cats and dogs is not endorsed by informed veterinarians. (See Not Fit For A Dog: The Truth About Manufactured Dog and Cat Food by veterinarians Fox, Hodgkins and Smart, Quill Driver Books, 2009.) All the pet-care products bearing her branded name, from dog beds to toys and grooming equipment, are MADE IN CHINA, and most are made from non-biodegradable synthetic petrochemicals. They easily could and should be Organically Certified and include recycled materials where appropriate. They should have been made by cooperatives in the U.S. with a little in-country networking rather than outsourcing and supporting China‘s economy. This would surely give additional value of the MADE IN THE USA cache to conscientious consumers. There are many such pet products on the market (See Whole Green Catalog, Michael W. Robbins, ed. Rodale Press 2009). Ms. Stewart‘s ―Omnimedia‖ Special Offers on her main website say it all: An omnimedia marketing strategy which, in the pet sector, includes her own product displays in Petsmart Stores across the U.S., and coupling with Purina‘s nation-wide, 11-city tour to give 63,000lb of cat and dog food away to local animal shelters to set up food-banks for rescued dogs and cats, and to give away with every pet adopted. This feel-good omnimedia strategy includes television shows on pet care and exotic pets, and pet columnist advice in local newspapers via Newsday syndicate which now includes the Minneapolis based Star Tribune, my home-town newspaper. The new pet-care column is by a pet shop owner and exotic animal dealer Marc Morrone. It is heavily slanted toward giving basic advice on the care of exotic captive wild animals and domesticated cage and aquarium animals, which indirectly condones and encourages such ownership and the kinds of animals that he sells. I would call this a conflict of interest. Animals for sale on his website include hedgehogs, sugar gliders, pygmy possums, tarantulas, tortoises and ferrets, African Grey and Amazon parrots, Macaws, Cockatoos and a variety of other terrestrial and aquatic species. From one Internet source I read that in 1978, this ―longtime animal lover Marc Morrone opened up Parrots of the World, Aquarium and Pet Center an importer and exporter (and later breeder) of exotic birds, mammals, and reptiles from Central and South America, Africa and Asia. From his Rockville, N.Y., shop, Morrone became a real-life Dr. Doolittle, dispensing advice on how to train a cockatiel, care for a hedgehog, or raise a ferret. Eight years ago, Morrone caught the eye of Martha Stewart, who invited him to be a guest on her nationally televised show. And in 2003, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia gave him his own twice-weekly, half-hour syndicated program -- Petkeeping with Marc Morrone, boasting more than a million viewers nationwide.‖ The wild-animal import-export business is a worldwide assault on biodiversity, rife with corruption, animal cruelty, suffering and death, which I have witnessed in Africa and India, as many species are pushed to the brink of extinction. Captive breeding is now in vogue with its conservation claim of ―Helping the wild by not taking from the wild.‖ But these animals are not domesticated and are unsuited to live their entire lives as captives in artificial environments. It is often cheaper to replace them than to invest in veterinary care, but they are not disposable commodities. The same is true for domesticated cage and aquarium animals, from guineapigs and rabbits to parakeets and goldfish, the commerical breeding facilities for which are often deplorable, unispected and unlicensed. This commoditization of animals moved

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me to investigate and report on the intolerable ―puppy mills,‖ the pure-breed dog (American Kennel Club registered) production sector of the pet trade, where the cruel methods of mass production result in much animal sickness and suffereing, regardless of U.S. government inspections. The expanding commoditization of more and more animals and species for our own consuption for food; as enjoyable pets, for clothing, to hunt and kill, and even as genetically engineered and cloned novelties is unacceptable if we are to continue to consider ourselves civilized. I have raised these concerns in my Animal Doctor syndicated newspaper column with United Feature Syndicate, New York, for over 30 years. Complaints from readers and from various animal industry sectors were always forwarded to the syndicate office, often by a newspaper ombudsman, for me to address. But not so with the Star Tribune, which suddenly replaced my column in October of 2010 with animal dealer Marc Morrone‘s column. I heard three different reasons from the Star Tribune regarding why this was done: They had received some complaints from readers; they wanted a greater variety of animal species other than dogs and cats addressed in my column; the Morrone column was cheaper, and the paper has financial difficulties. Surely every newspaper has a professional duty and ethical obligation to inform their columnists, be they local, national or international, of any and all reader complaints. Perhaps where I live it is ―Minnseota nice‖ not to do so. That is certainly not so with the other newspapers that carry my column like the Washington Post, which has been publishing my column for many years and always gave me readership feedback, be it from the National Pork Producers Council, an annoyed veterinarian or a know-it-all cat owner. Whatever the truth, the fact remains that many excellent newspapers have either gone or are going under because of the kind of ominmedia domination by multinational congromerates. Their economies of scale give them a competetive market edge, along with their consumer-choice reducing monopolies (like our Big Box pet stores and associated veterinary franchises). The main-stream pet-food industry, a multibillion dollar sector of industrial agriculture, includes such multinational corporations as Nestle‘s Inc. (that owns Purina) Proctor and Gamble Inc. (that owns Iams and Eukanuba), and Colgate Palmolive (that owns Hill‘s Science Diet). It is the power of informed consumers voting with their dollars, and enlightened venture capitalists backing greater market choices, as per organically certified, ecologically sound and socially just products and services, that can stop the juggernaut of this consumptive monoculture of mass-marketing though monopolistic media and outlet-market control. Supporting your local farmers‘ market, local newspaper, independent public radio and TV, and independent health food, pet store and food co-operatives are part and parcel of civil society initiatives. They should not be undermined by some Mammonist marketeers importing cheaper and often inferior produce, and editors doing no less with what they decide to publish in their newspapers. Perhaps Martha Stewart Living can help turn the tide, Go Green, and help bring to our market place U.S. made products, including pet toys and accessories, and capitalize on the nascent organic pet food and certified nutraceutical supplement market. *e-mail IPAN@erols.com website www.twobitdog.com/DrFox/ 2135 Indiana Ave N Golden Valley MN 55422 Tel: 763-432-0900

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WOLF CONCERNS---SHOOTING, HUNTING & TRAPPING MAY SOON RESUME THE ENDANGERED SPECIES STATUS OF MINNESOTA‘S WOLVES IS ENDANGERED I sent the following Letter to the Editor, the Star Tribune (in Minneapolis, MN) on Nov 19th, 2010 (which was not published). ―Re; Question of wolves is again at our door (Nov 17th). Thanks to Ms. Giese and the Center for Biological Diversity for this article pointing out that a handful of Minnesotans want to take away the legal protection of the Federal Endangered Species Act from the Great Lakes wolves. This is surely outrageous to most reasonable, if not also caring people, since the protection of the wolf by our government was a democratically agreed upon decision. For the U.S. government (Fish and Wildlife Service) to support these vested interests by taking the indigenous wolves off the protected species list would be anti-democratic at best; and closer to the kind of ecological anarchy with a bio-warfare mentality that is already casting a long shadow across the beginning of this century. As Ms. Giese points out, there are many ways of dealing with wolf-human conflicts without having to resort to removing the wolves‘ legal protections, which will mean escalated killing, and then wolf fur will back in fashionable vengeance to once again offend the public eye. I was not very surprised to read in the Nov. 20th Star Tribune a rebuttal to lawyer-conservationist Gies‘ article, entitled ―Setting the record straight on wolves‖ from the Director of the International Wolf Center, (IWC) founded by Dr. David Mech who debated me at a public meeting convened by the Wild Canid Research & Survival Center some years ago in St. Louis over his opposition to ever putting the Gray or North American Timber Wolf on the Endangered Species list. The current IWC executive director Mary Oritz endorses the de-listing of the wolf from the Endangered Species Act protections in favor of MDNR (Minnesota Department of Natural Resources) management which she says ―would continue to protect wolves for at least five years after federal delisting.‖ According to Minnesotan Karlyn Atkinson Berg of HOWL (Help Our Wolves Live), there is nothing written to prevent the hunting of wolves during this time period, and that reporter Doug Smith was on the mark when he told me that ―a limited season for hunting wolves will come after that time.‖ I find this no less offensive as a wolf ethologist and conservationist (author of the Soul of the Wolf) than Ms. Oritz and the International Wolf Center dismissing the parvovirus threat to wolf populations and packs. This is one of several disease transmitted by infected free-roaming and feral dogs and possibly cats, which the MDNR needs to address, along with diseases transmitted by livestock to deer and other wild herbivores. As a veterinarian I am familiar with the diseases domestic animals transmit to wildlife for which wildlife are often exterminated for fear of them re-infecting livestock. This is a vicious circle indeed, which Ms.Oritz would see as a management issue rather than as an ethical dilemma because it is almost always resolved by extermination. Putting out birth-control-drug- laced baits is an alternative population management tool, but fraught with some ecological, non-target animal, and target-

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animal health and behavioral consequences with possible secondary effects on pack dynamics and integrity. The widespread broadcasting of bait containing genetically engineered live rabies virus to ostensibly stop the spread of rabies in various wild carnivore populations across the U.S. warrants some basic research safety determinations because of non-target species infection, and possible viral recombination and mutation. Ms. Oritz‘s contention that ―The court rulings against federal wolf delisting were based on legal technicalities, not biological considerations‖ is based on her assumption that having an estimated 4,000 wolves in the entire states of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan is way above the ―officially approved biological recovery level in 1978.‖ Considering the numbers of managed deer herds that are harvested by hunters in these states, it is little wonder that hunter-displaced wolves might come to prey on cattle and other livestock. In the opening weekend for firearms hunters of Minnesota‘s deer season in 2010, the Star Tribune reported the killing of 90,000 Whitetail deer, with a season total kill estimate of 200,000.((Nov.10th, 2010). Star Tribune‘s Outdoors Reporter of these figures, Doug Smith, told me that there would be an additional deer killing by bow hunters totaling an additional 20,000 deer, based on figures for 2009. I would say let the wolves assume a greater role in deer-herd ‗management‘, and let the wild forests return and heal. Cut back the hunters first before the old growth trees, and let the wolves remain on the Endangered Species list because they are under constant threat of human encroachment, conflict and retaliation. It is time for rapprochement, for more ‗biophilia‘ to quote Harvard biologist-conservationist E.O.Wilson, and an end to biological warfare which is surely not justified when there are only 4,000 wolves in these three states, a number which some wolf biologists and conservationists believe to be highly questionable. Ms. Berg with HOWL , lamenting the lack of public education about the wolf to raise awareness and appreciation of the environmental values of this species, a primary, natural and superior wildlife and ecosystem manager to any DNR writes to me that ―If the public knew how poorly population counts were taken, that wolf mortality is under estimated and is even missing from the calculations here, they would know the number is questionable. In Minnesota (the worst offender) population counts are based upon "opinion surveys", peripheral information from studies of other species, and ancient extrapolations; hence little science is being used to come up with these numbers.‖ It was the Minnesota DNR that was the first to petition the U.S. government to de-list the Eastern Gray Timber wolf in March 2010 (See Federal Register Vol.75, No.177, Tuesday, Sept 14, 2010/Proposed Rules, p 55730-55735), this state being the core domain of this species. In April the Wisconsin DNR followed suit, and then in May the U.S. Sportsmen‘s Alliance, representing five other organizations, requested that the gray wolf in the Great Lakes area (Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan) be removed from the list of endangered and threatened species under the Act. In June the Safari Club International and the National Rifle Association joined forces in a similar petition to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Of these three states, the Minnesota DNR management plans are the worst since they do not mandate any effective, humane management practices; permit the killing of wolves in the act of ―stalking‖ livestock on private property, and has a $150 bounty for killing wolves in depredation control areas. The superior Michigan DNR management plan includes public education and helping ranchers implement appropriate husbandry practices, while Wisconsin DNR states that it ―will focus on prevention and mitigation rather than wolf removal. Public education and proactive measures to reduce wolf predation are non existent in the Minnesota DNR management plan, a point emphasized in the Nov 15th 2010 Comments to the U.s. Fish

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and Wildlife by Washington DC based Defenders of Wildlife. But this organization clearly contradicts its own name by supporting the de-listing of the gray wolf in the western Great Lakes from the Endangered Species Act to permit killing as a management tool and inevitably wolf hunting and trapping. The relentless persecution of the North American wolf and other wild carnivores---from the California cougar and the Florida panther to the Black footed ferret, wily Coyote and Grizzly and Brown bears by the livestock industry has been paid for by the public for decades. State and federal governments have waged biological warfare on these species in total disregard for the suffering and devastating ecological consequences of their anarchy. Currently, farmers and ranchers are compensated from the public coffers for livestock lost to wolves but not for losses from coyotes, weather or disease, so what‘s the beef? Cattle ranchers grazing their animals almost for free on our public lands even have the Bureau of Land Management eliminate competing wild mustangs from the range, while entire Prairie dog colonies are sucked out by giant vacuum cleaners. The shooting, trapping, snaring, clubbing, poisoning, den-bombing, cyanide-gunning and hunting-dog assisted killing of wild carnivores are outmoded wildlife management practices devoid of either scientific credibility or bioethical validity. The adoption of appropriate, non-lethal predation-minimizing farmed animal husbandry practices by farmers and ranchers whose free-range animals may be at risk, should be mandatory: And only when in place should there be any compensation for wildlife pathologist certified livestock losses due to predation. The vast majority of Americans who supported the Endangered Species Act for the protection of wolves and other dwindling species should not be betrayed by their government choosing to aid and abet continued ecological anarchy by a few who have no regard for all that is wild and part of the spirit of North America, the natural heritage of all citizens of this magnificent continent. A sustainable economy and the rule of law, especially as they pertain to eco-justice and the inherent value of wolves and all living beings, demand no less. Neither congress nor the Obama administration should permit the Department of the Interior‘s Fish and Wildlife Service to pander to those state interests bent on having Canis lupus de-listed as an endangered species because it will mean redoubled persecution, killing for sport, and, inevitably, more wolves being trapped and poisoned. The ethical, caring majority of U.S. citizens who continue to support the protection of endangered species and the conservation, restoration and preservation (CPR) of their habitats should not be betrayed. I urge all concerned citizens to contact their state representatives in Congress to let their voice of opposition to the de-listing of the Eastern Gray Timber wolf be heard by all who are responsible for the integrity and continued enforcement of the Endangered Species Act, and do not undermine its intent as an enduring legacy for this nation to embrace as a significant advance in civilization.. Dr. Michael W. Fox 2135 Indiana Ave N Golden Valley MN 55422 763-432-0900 ipan@erols.com

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-A LETTER RECEIVED

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News from the Amboseli Trust for Elephants January 2011 Dear Gary,

I'm sitting at the desk in my tent looking out on a particularly glorious Kilimanjaro with its

dark blue base and snow-covered top. It's been out all morning making me happy. I never

take a sight like this for granted nor the privilege of being able to work and live in Amboseli. This is the 36th year of having a camp in Ol Tukai Orok (the place of the dark

palms) and the 39th year of the Amboseli Elephant Research Project.

You might well ask, don't you know enough about elephants now, but the answer is definitely no. Elephants can live to about 70 so we've only just passed the halfway mark of

an elephant's lifespan. We would like to follow the entire life of individual elephants from

known birth to known death. We have some years to go. Also with every year added on to

the study we get exponentially more value from the data we collect.

Most important of all is our role here in trying to conserve this well-known and valuable

population of elephants. So much of what we do these days is not research but rather

attempts to find solutions to conservation crises and issues, such as ivory poaching and human-elephant conflict. There is simply no way we could wind up our work and leave the

elephants.

The Amboseli Trust for Elephants plans to be here in Amboseli for many years to come.

For this reason, my main fund-raising goal now is to build up an endowment for the Trust. If you are thinking of leaving a bequest to a charitable organization please consider ATE.

You can begin a conversation by writing to info@elephanttrust.org. Betsy Swart, our

Executive Director in the US, will get in touch to discuss possibilities.

With regards,

Cynthia Moss

Director Amboseli Trust for Elephants

Social Disruption Study

The recent extreme drought in East Africa (2008-2009), combined with poaching, killed

almost 400 of the 1550 individually known and continuously tracked elephants in

Amboseli, Kenya. More than half of the experienced matriarchs died - these were the

leaders of their families, responsible for knowing where to find food and water, safety from threats, and how to manage social networks over a 60+ year lifespan. Families were left

with less inexperienced matriarchs, reduced social cohesion and potentially poor

reproductive performance.

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We are very keen to study and understand: 1) how the complex, matriarchal society of

elephants responds to the sudden and wholesale

loss of it leaders; and 2) what the implications

are for elephant conservation.

We have found an excellent post-doctoral

scientist to carry out this important work. Dr

Vicki Fishlock, who studied forest elephants in the Republic of Congo for her Ph.D., joined ATE

in January 2011. She aims to collect detailed

data on 12 families examining how interactions

with and between families have changed pre- and post- matriarch death. This project will be carried out in collaboration with the International Fund of Animal Welfare, Inc. a long-

time partner of ATE.

Vicki Fishlock on her first day in Amboseli

Patrick Papatiti: Super Scout - Harvey Croze

It was clear from Patrick Papatit's first few months with us in 2007 that he was a rather

special young man. We were training him as part of the group of warriors from the

surrounding Maasai community to be Elephant Scouts: eyes and ears, and early warning of

human-elephant conflict in the ecosystem. The scout program not only provides good information of presence of elephants outside of Amboseli National Park, but it engenders

goodwill in the community and a strong sense of

pride and achievement among the otherwise

unemployed young men.

Anyway, Patrick, like many of his contemporaries

had never finished school -- his parents just couldn't afford it. Despite that, his canniness and

his self-taught literary skills allowed him to

become quickly adept at operating a Garmin GPS

and record elephant sightings or piles of dung (see image) onto our datasheets.

He also displayed impressive insight and

determination when, after a few months of scouting, he realised that he had to go back to

school. And so he did, at 27 years old towering

above his classmates, he doggedly attended class

and finished first in his class at Kajiado

Secondary School.

Patrick worked for us as a Maasai Scout

supervisor and then went to work for Deborah Rooney, and her wonderful BEADS -- Beads for

Education, Advancement, Development and

Success -- project that provides

education opportunities for Maasai girls (see BEADS).

Patrick with GPS and datasheet recording elephant dung

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ATE and BEADS have pooled their

modest resources to make sure that

Partick's full potential can be realised and are supporting his university studies at

the US International University in

Nairobi. USIU is accredited by the USA-

based Western Association of Schools and Colleges, and is a fine university (I

should know, my son Anselm got his

Masters there). We wish Patrick every success in his studies and sincerely hope that when he finishes, he will come back to work in the ecosystem to help ensure future space for elephants and other wildlife. Another great example of ATE reaching out to the community on behalf of the elephants.

Bill & Deb Rooney, BEADS founders, with Patrick Papatiti on a visit to Amboseli in January

The History of the EB Family

I first met the EBs in August 1973. I was with my colleague Harvey Croze, who helped

set up the Project. At the time we were working part-time on the study based in Nairobi.

On that trip we photographed several families, and among them was a female with bony shoulders who carried her head low. We found this "head-low female" again in November

of that year and photographed her along with an older female who had two U-shaped tears

out of her right ear. I saw these two females together several more times over the next

months. It appeared that they belonged to a small family consisting of about seven members.

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In April 1974 Harvey and I put radio-collars on

three adult females in the population. At that time we did not know the population well and

thus we simply chose the animals

opportunistically, trying to find matriarchs from

different parts of the Park to determine their movements and distribution. We decided to start

in the East. We went to the Longinye Swamp

and the first group we came upon happened to

be the family with the "head-low" and "U-nicks right" females. We chose the oldest female, the

matriarch, and Harvey shot her with a dart

containing an immobilizing drug. The collar was

quickly secured, some measurements taken, and then she was given an antidote which took affect

very rapidly. In a few minutes she was up on her

feet and in less than half an hour she was back with her family. We were fascinated to see

that the family, although very frightened, would not leave the scene but rather waited about

200 meters away watching nervously. On this day we were able to get a good look at the family and note down the age structure. There were two adult females, two adolescents--a

male and female, and three calves--one about two years old, another about five years old,

and the third about six years old.

We hadn't yet assigned the family an alphabetical code nor had we given the females

names. Because we often saw these elephants closely associated with the family that we

had already assigned the code EA to, we assigned them the code EB. We named the

matriarch with the radio collar "Echo" because of the sounds her collar was making, and the second female "Emily". Echo was the female with the two U-shaped nicks, and Emily

was the "head-low female".

To read the full history of the EB family on our website, click here.

Echo with her radio collar in 1974

Become an Elephant Sustainer - Harvey Croze

If you feel strongly about the future of elephants, particularly our very special population

in Amboseli and the work ATE is doing to understand and protect them, why not consider becoming an Amboseli Elephant Sustainer?

If just the 1,000-plus readers of our newsletter would donate a few dollars (pick your currency) a week -- the price of a couple of cappuccinos -- it would meet our core

operating costs.

A good number of Elephant Sustainers making small but steady weekly contributions via

their credit or debit card would enable ATE to plan more effectively around long-term

costs such as the work of our dynamic Maasai women field team.

For over three decades, Cynthia has been travelling to the USA to make or renew contact with

a small but loyal group of individual and foundation donors to raise enough cash to keep our

elephant conservation and research work going. Our 'regulars' still provide terrific

encouragement and support, but this year, due to the financial crisis, we are in a serious cash

situation.

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We have had to make significant cutbacks in our vital outreach to the Maasai community --

bursaries for school girls, scholarships for promising young university candidates, consolation

for loss or injury from human-elephant encounters -- just to be able to pay salaries of the field

team and fuel for the field vehicles.

We need to be more efficient and effective in our fund-raising, and help Cynthia to spend less time on the road and more time overseeing the vital work here in Amboseli: securing

corridors for elephant in the ecosystem, maintaining the projects uniquely strong science

base, and adding her influential advocacy voice to international campaigns for elephants and ecosystems.

A very small donation of $3 to $10 per week from 1,000 Amboseli Elephant Sustainers would enable our conservation and research to continue uninterrupted without

fear of a cash crisis. The Sustainers would be actively participating "to ensure the long-

term conservation and welfare of Africa's elephants in the context of human needs and

pressures through scientific research, training, community

outreach,

public

awareness

and advocacy"

(our mission).

A sustaining donation is very easy to set up. Click on the 'Become a Sustainer' button in

the left sidebar. That will take you to our

Click&Pledge page. The minimum amount you

can enter is US$ 40. But if you want, for example, to donate $5 per week, click on

'Make my payment recurring' and select every '2 Months'. If you want to sacrifice two

cappuccinos a week, you could select '1 Month'. Whatever you decide.

We've seen over the years that donating is an act of hope and of trust. The trustees and staff of ATE feel a weighty sense of responsibility to be the stewards of such hope on

behalf of the elephants. Our team is deeply committed to respecting the trust you place in

us. We in turn hope that you will help us sustain the Amboseli elephants now and into the

future -- a future we are now measuring in the lifespan of the calves that will be born tomorrow.

Echo with her last calf and grandkids: their

future is in our hands

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The animal world

I asked Santa for a pet but this is ridiculous! I hope he’s

housebroken!

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A CHANCE ENCOUNTER

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A Beautiful Snow Moose

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Baby Giraffe

Her eyes are beautiful. Most babies measuring 5 ft would be considered big, but newborn giraffe, Margaret, at Chester Zoo, UK is seen as unusually small for her species. She is one of the smallest giraffes ever born at Chester Zoo but pint-sized Margaret will soon be an animal to look up to. Little Margaret, who is the first female Rothschild giraffe born at the zoo, is being hand-reared by her dedicated keepers. The first calf for six-year-old mum Fay, Margaret, who was born two weeks early, tipped the scales at just 34 kilos (75 lbs) and is a mere 5 ft tall. Tim Rowland's, team leader of the Giraffes section, said: 'Margaret is one of the smallest giraffe calves we have ever seen. Fay isn't the largest of giraffes and Margaret was also early which might go some way to explaining her size. 'Margaret was having difficulty suckling so our keeping team are now hand-rearing her.'

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Human interest

ACCIDENTAL ARTIST By Tim Gihring-Minnesota Monthly Magazine-January 2011

Robert Fisch—painter, doctor, holocaust survivor—on the luck of the draw That‘s the difference between an optimist and a pessimist?‖ asks Robert Fisch. ―The optimist says, ‗This is the best world we could possibly have.‘ The pessimist says, ‗You‘re right.‘‖ ¶ To visit Fisch in his Minneapolis high rise is to partake of German beer and chocolates—his favorite treats—and jokes. He tells them constantly and no one laughs louder at them than him. But they almost all have an earnest message, which is that life should not be taken too seriously. ¶ ―My life has been one accident after another,‖ he says. Born in Hungary, he was 18 when the Nazis sent him and his father to concentration camps.His father starved to death; he survived. When communists overran Hungary after the war, he escaped them, too, eventually becoming a pediatrician at the University of Minnesota Medical School.

Then another, more happy, accident happened. In the mid-1990s, after he spoke to schoolchildren in Pine City about the Holocaust, a teacher suggested he write a book about his experiences. He did: Light from The Yellow Star: A Lesson of Love from the Holocaust. Then he wrote several more, illustrating them himself with stylized paintings: boxcars loaded with people, the death camps. He hoped to humanize the horror. ―Fifty-nine million dead,‖ he says. ―What does that mean? We have to talk about individuals.‖ This month, the Minnesota History Center opens The Value of One Life, an exhibit based on Fisch‘s approach. Through photographs and interviews, it relates the stories of eight Minnesota survivors, from refugees to a wrongly imprisoned man to Fisch himself. Incarceration, Fisch says, taught him an unusual lesson. ―You‘re not going to change the world,‖ he says. ―The world changes without you. But you can change yourself.‖ He smiles. ―My favorite cartoon is of a guy in the desert—utterly lost. A sign in the sand says, ‗You are here.‘‖ Fisch laughs a long while, then reaches for another chocolate. 5 THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT ROBERT 1. His paintings were among the first works displayed in the Weisman Art Museum. 2. He co-manages a foundation helping medical students explore their artistic side. 3. He started Project Read to have volunteers read to children in medical waiting rooms. 4. He has written articles with economist Art Rolnick on early childhood education. 5. He‘s a fan of the Dalai Lama. ―He‘s a joker, like a teenage boy. We can learn from that.‖

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HOLIDAY GREETINGS FROM ROBERT

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THE THREE BURIALS OF ALSTON ANDERSON By Lawrence Downes-New York Times-January 12, 2011 Alston Anderson was buried on Saturday for the second time — or the third, if you count the slow sinking that constituted his long but unrewarded life. He was an African-American short-story writer, poet, novelist and jazz critic. He spent three years in the Army in World War II and three months of 1955 at Yaddo, the writers’ colony in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. He studied philosophy at Columbia and the Sorbonne. He had sharp talent and famous friends: Richard Wright, Terry Southern, Robert Graves. His work was chosen for anthologies of “jazz fiction” and of the best “Negro writers.” He had a story in The New Yorker and an interview with Nelson Algren in The

Paris Review. What he didn’t have were money, lasting acclaim and, evidently, family. When he died in Manhattan on July 15, 2008, at 84, no one claimed his remains. The government buried him in the potter’s field at Hart Island. The next two-and-a-half years would have extended into forever but for a program that tracks down the remains of indigent veterans and provides them proper military burials. That was how Mr. Anderson came to join 19 other veterans buried on Saturday at Calverton

National Cemetery on Long Island. No one could say much about them. The eulogist did what he could, reading everyone’s name and years of service, and then a poem about going to the arms of Jesus. He did not say that the coffin in the first row on his far right held the author of “Lover Man,” stories of Southern black life, told in a voice jazz-inflected and rural, and a novel, “All God’s Children.” I found him myself only through chance. Googling “Anderson Alston” from the funeral press release led to the suspicion that the name was backward. The author’s Internet

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trail matched the soldier’s exactly: born 1924, Panama Canal Zone; lived in Kingston, Jamaica, and Oxford, N.C.; 1943 to 1946 in the Army, private to master sergeant; then Germany, France, New York. On Friday, I e-mailed Micki McGee, a Fordham University professor who wrote a book about Yaddo that led to an exhibition at the New York Public Library. She called back instantly. She told me that it had been Mr. Anderson’s sad file that convinced her to tell the Yaddo story. “I think I’m going to cry,” she said when she heard about his reburial. Mr. Anderson was at Yaddo with James Baldwin. He left under a cloud; notes in his files tell of bad behavior and his mixing with “objectionable characters.” He was dunned for months after for an unpaid $13.36 phone bill. He tried to explain. “I find it impossible,” he wrote to Yaddo’s executive director, Elizabeth Ames, “to work eight hours a day and write at the same time.” He survived on “baby-sitting and odd typing jobs, just enough to provide one meal a day. It would be a very simple thing for me to get a job and pay my debts, and I’m very much aware that this is what I should do. But I feel that once I make such a compromise I’ll become an $80-a-week clerk and that will be the end of me. I am determined that that shall not happen.” He changed addresses six times that year, and later told Graves that he nearly froze to death that winter. His request to return to Yaddo was rejected. “Lover Man,” however, got great reviews. “Perfect ear, warm heart,” said The Times. “First-class,” said Time magazine. Graves wrote its foreword. He said he couldn’t imagine how his young friend with the “nervous smile, tall, spare body and soft voice,” had been a master sergeant. “Behaviour too mild, sense of humour too keen, habits too vague,” he wrote. But an officer Mr. Anderson was, at 21. He served in Bandar Shahpur, Iran, editing the post newspaper. I don’t know the rest of his story, but I saw the last bit of it. It was in a big white tent, on a gray day after a snowstorm. The honor guards maneuvered 20 coffins with crisp dignity. Veterans, in embroidered jackets and baseball caps, stood at attention and saluted and applauded. Politicians gave speeches; this consecration far above their power to add or detract. Mr. Anderson, like the others, had an engraved nameplate on his silver coffin and was given a flag, a volley of gunfire, taps. Twenty men, received an overdue wave of respect and admiration, even though it was too late for them to accept it, and nobody knew who they were.

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Philanthropy

Children’s HeartLink Program Accomplishments for FY 2010

Children‘s Hearllink‘s work in fiscal year 2010 focused on providing a range of educational and technical assistance opportunities for pediatric cardiac professionals in the developing world, including six full team cardiac training visits, and eight off-site trainings. Our volunteer medical teams come from institutions such as Lucile Packard Children‘s Hospital at Stanford University, New York Presbyterian Hospital for Sick Children, Mayo Clinic, Seattle Children‘s Hospital, and Birmingham Children‘s Hospital in the United Kingdom. Work with partner sites Throughout the year, Children‘s HeartLink continued its commitment to developing close working relationships with our partners in order to understand their needs. As appropriate, we continued to provide targeted support to areas of need, as well as full cardiac team training visits. China In October 2009, to provide focused training to West China Hospital #1‘s ICU staff, a critical care team from The Hospital for Sick Children visited West China Hospital for a weeklong training visit. In their follow-up report, The Hospital for Sick Children observed significant progress in several areas: The West China Hospital #1 team exhibited an increased awareness and focus on teamwork, had better knowledge of current concepts surrounding infection control, and were more consistently using a broader array of pain control strategies. The small-team training visit also helped to identify other aspects of West China Hospital #1‘s critical care needs which are being incorporated into future activities with that partner site. In October 2009 a critical care team from the Lucile Packard Children‘s Hospital and Minneapolis Community and Technical College visited the First Hospital of Lanzhou University to provide focused training to ICU staff, a pediatric cardiologist from the University of Minnesota Amplatz Children‘s Hospital provided focused training in detecting and diagnosing cardiac lesions to cardiology staff. India In June 2010, the first Children‘s HeartLink sponsored interventional cardiology workshop occurred in India. The workshop series represents a new approach for Children‘s HeartLink; it does not focus on a single partner site but rather a larger effort to build capacity across India by developing practitioner skills. Dr. Krishna Kumar, pediatric cardiologist from SevenHills Hospital in Mumbai, conducted the workshop. In his previous position as director of the cardiology department at Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences in Kochi, Dr. Kumar participated in and facilitated many Children‘s HeartLink training opportunities for the Amrita pediatric cardiac program. The June interventional cardiology workshop took place at SevenHills Hospital in Visakhapatnam (Vizag). The purpose was twofold: to train the pediatric staff at SevenHills, and to train a

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broader group of adult and pediatric cardiologists and pediatricians. About 120 people attended the workshop, either in person or through the online broadcast. Live footage from the cath lab was broadcast, with a live discussion following. Five cases were scheduled for the workshop; two were transmitted live. Attendees‘ feedback was very positive, and Dr. Kumar fielded many questions during the discussion. In the spring of 2010, Children‘s HeartLink supported a cardiologist from Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences to spend a 2-week observership at Boston Children‘s Hospital concentrating on cardiac MRI and cardio genetics. As a result of the training, a pediatric cardiac MRI service was started at Amrita and the site is on its way to standardizing their systems and enhancing their imaging capabilities. In addition, the Amrita cardiologist presented at the American College of Cardiology Scientific Sessions on the innovative research Amrita is doing on cardio genetics. In June 2010, Children‘s HeartLink organized the third full-team cardiac training visit to Innova Children‘s Heart Hospital in Hyderabad with a volunteer team from Lucile Packard Children‘s Hospital at Stanford. In addition to intensive training and mentoring activities between the Stanford and Innova doctors and nurses, key accomplishments from the visit included:

-The third annual ―Innova-Stanford Conclave,‖ a successful and well attended conference on pediatric cardiac care, for doctors and nurses from throughout South India, and -Successful pilot of the Parent Education Discharge Instructions (PEDI) project. The newly created PEDI materials, intended to help parents better understand how to care for their child after open heart surgery-were introduced to nursing staff and parents. Children‘s HeartLink hopes to expand this project to other sites across India in the near future.

Also in June, Bistra Zheleva, Children‘s Hearllink‘s Assistant Director of International Programs, met with stakeholders in pediatric cardiac care across India to explore opportunities for Children‘s HeartLink to expand our reach in the country. Ms. Zheleva met with representatives from Children‘s Heartlink‘s current partner sites Narayana Hrudayalaya in Bangalore and Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences in Kochi: ACCESS Health International, a Hyderabad-based NGO dedicated to improving access to high quality, affordable health services; All India Institute of Medical Sciences and Escorts Hospital in New Delhi: Kokilaben Hospital and SevenHills Hospital in Mumbai; Medtronic India; the Public Health Foundation of India, and WHO India. South Africa In October 2009, pediatric cardiac surgeon Frank Hanley from Lucile Packard Children‘s Hospital at Stanford visited Red Cross War Memorial Children‘s Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa, to observe surgical and clinical practices and to meet with local cardiac and administrative staff to discuss possible opportunities for future collaboration. In February 2010, pediatric cardiac surgeon John Hewitson from Red Cross War Memorial Children‘s Hospital visited Lucile Packard Children‘s Hospital to observe surgical and clinical practices and to meet with local cardiac staff and hospital administration. Visits by the two surgeons represent efforts by Children‘s HeartLink to promote future interdisciplinary collaboration and cooperation between the two institutions, for the benefit of children in sub-Saharan Africa suffering from heart disease.

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Ukraine In 2010, Children‘s HeartLink continued to work with our partners to expand distance learning opportunities for our partner site in Ukraine, the Ukrainian Children‘s Cardiac Center (UCCC) in Kiev. Through the teleconference link established with Seattle Children‘s Hospital, the two pediatric cardiac teams have for some time been conducting twice-weekly video case discussions, greatly enhancing both teams‘ learning opportunities and exposing them to diverse clinical conditions and approaches. This year, Children‘s HeartLink supported nurse educators at Seattle Children‘s in launching a nursing education teleconference series, with the goal of building learning and mentoring relationships between the two teams of nurses and improving pediatric cardiac nursing skills and practice at the UCCC. Children‘s HeartLink also organized a six-week long training at Seattle Children‘s Hospital for a pediatric cardiologist from the Ukrainian Children‘s Cardiac Center. Learning objectives for the visit focused on improving the cardiologist‘s skills in conventional and fetal echocardiography, and developing a more thorough understanding of how to apply a team approach in managing pediatric cardiac patients. Vietnam Established in 2008, the partnership with Nhi Dong 1 (Children‘s Hospital #1) in Ho Chi Minh City brought Children‘s HeartLink back to the country where its programs began. The main objectives of the partnership have been to advance the quality and quantity of pediatric cardiac services in the region by supporting the professional development of pediatric cardiac care professionals; to promote the development of a regional pediatric cardiac center for southern Vietnam; and to help assure the sustainable development of cardiac services and their continued support.

In fiscal year 2010 Children‘s HeartLink mobilized cardiac teaching and training at Nhi Dong 1 with medical volunteers from Singapore and the U.S. Surgical capacity has steadily increased with the patient volume growing to 100+ surgical patients a year. The chief accomplishment for the year was the beginning of a series of focused training in pediatric cardiac nursing by a nurse educator from Singapore. The outcomes of these visits were improved cardiac nursing practice and competence in several areas such as physical assessment of critically ill children, prioritizing nursing care activities and close monitoring of

cardiac patients, communicating critical information to the intensive care physician during a crisis situation, heart structures and various heart defects, and medication dispensation. Malaysia In October 2009 a medical volunteer team from Birmingham Children‘s Hospital, UK, provided advanced training and education to the pediatric cardiac team at Institut Jantung Negara (National Heart Institute) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The goal of this partnership has been to enhance and expand the diagnostic, treatment, and prevention service for Malaysian children, focusing on more complex cases. The team was able to provide important training and education through lecture, bedside training, tutorials, ward rounds, case based discussion, and strategic leadership to the IJN staff. About 100 clinical staff members from IJN as well as visiting staff from Vietnam attended lecture on hemofiltration and dialysis and on management of low cardiac output state. The main outcomes of the visit were improved surgical capacity for treating patients with AVSD (atrioventricular septal defect), and development of a strategy and goals to improve patient care in the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU). (One year later IJN reports lower mortality rates related to AVSD surgery.)

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In April 2010 a team consisting of three nurses, a perfusionist and an intensive care physician spent two weeks training at Birmingham Children‘s. The visit focused on different aspects of caring for pediatric cardiac patients from admission to ICU discharge and the use of a team approach in managing pediatric cardiac cases. The nurses had an opportunity to do patient assessment and learn about nursing practice in the UK, some of which they planned to apply at IJN. The intensive care physician‘s learning focused on ICU management and planning, to be applied later in the PICU at IJN. Participation in team morning rounds and case discussions was critical for the visiting team as it provided another opportunity to apply the team approach to pediatric cardiac care, an area that IJN has targeted for assistance as it continues to work toward becoming a regional center of excellence in treatment and training in pediatric cardiac care.

Brazil In September 2009, Children‘s HeartLink added a new partner site: Hospital de Base in Sao Jose do Rio Preto, Brazil. A team of medical volunteers from Mayo Clinic and University of Minnesota Amplatz Children‘s Hospital completed the first full-team cardiac training visit to Hospital de Base that month. In June 2010, Children‘s HeartLink sent a second team, with volunteers from Children‘s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota and Mayo Clinic. During each trip, medical volunteers spent a week working side-by-side with and training the local pediatric cardiac staff, as well as providing patient screening and treatment. To be selected as a partner site, a hospital needs to demonstrate a commitment to pediatric cardiac care. Hospital de Base began its pediatric cardiac program in 2002 and has a pediatric cardiac surgeon on staff. Hospital de Base also plans to move its pediatric cardiac program to a new adjacent children‘s hospital, currently under construction. Children‘s HeartLink and the two volunteer teams will continue to work with Hospital de Base to enhance the knowledge and technical skills of its cardiac team and to promote its development as a

regional center of excellence.

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Ecuador This year, Children‘s HeartLink provided support for a new pilot project-a study to help determine the extent of congenital transmission of Chagas disease in Ecuador. Children‘s HearLink‘s support supplements funds provided by the European Union through the Chagas EpiNet project. According to project leaders, there is virtually no information about congenital transmission of Chagas disease in Ecuador, where lack of awareness and resource limitations has resulted in the absence of efforts to detect and treat congenital transmission.

The first step of the project has involved working with the Ecuadorian Ministry of Health to set up a thorough screening and diagnosis program at Maternidad Sotomayor, one of the largest maternity wards in Ecuador, located in Guayaquil. With the information gathered through this study researchers hope to develop a comprehensive maternal and newborn screening program aimed at detecting and treating congenital cases countrywide. Children‘s HeartLink also continues to support Chagas disease prevention in the Loja and Manabi Provinces in Ecuador, working in partnership with the Tropical Disease Institute of Ohio University, the World Health Organization, and the Catholic University of Ecuador.

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art

THE PURSUIT OF PRINTS Art & Antiques-September 2010 By James Panero

Jo and Leslie Garfield have built their home around a seminal collection of modernist works.

Here in their high-rise Upper East Side apartment with sweeping views of Central Park, Leslie and Johanna Garfield, the husband-and-wife collecting team, could always use that extra square foot for their latest acquisition. Six years ago, in order to accommodate their growing collection, the apartment underwent a four-year renovation before the couple moved in. Today the home doubles as a private gallery, with specially constructed hallways and sliding walls, conservation space, and an office for an in-house cataloger and registrar. Still, there never seems to be quite enough room. ―Hanging and getting things in place is not an easy thing to do,‖ says Jo. Fortunately, that lack of wall space has never prevented them from going after the next print. The passion of these two residents for their

collection—and for the art of collecting—shows little interest in such trivial considerations.

―When I bought my first print in 1954, by Erich Heckel—a woodcut illustration for Dostoevsky in 1915—things burst all over me,‖ says Les. ―The primal scream became a part of my life.‖ He encountered his first print in a Munich gallery while in the army. ―That led to me to a 10 or 12-year period of collecting black and white German expressionist prints.‖ Les now hangs that first print among his many others from the period on a wall by the front door.

But Les has Jo to thank for leading him in a different direction, one that has today resulted in an acclaimed focus of the collection. In the early 1980s, Jo saw an example of the color-rich work of the then under-appreciated Provincetown Printers, an early American avant-garde circle on Cape Cod centered around Blanche Lazzell, a pioneer of the ―white-line‖ woodblock print. She knew they had to go for it. ―They just made me feel good, and the German

Cyril E. Power, Tube Train 1939

Claude Flight, Brooklands

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Expressionist ones didn‘t,‖ Jo recalls. ―You fall in love with something and like the work, and you pursue it,‖ explains Les. ―And that‘s exactly what happened with Provincetown. It was Jo who saw the first print, and this mad chase was on to locate dealers and people who had this work.‖

The chase led the couple from galleries to knocking on the doors of Lazzell‘s relatives in West Virginia. ―Over the years, I was able to get the block and the print from a relative, then the drawing for the print, then a watercolor for the print, and I love it,‖ says Les. ―I guess that‘s why I never sold anything.‖

Les says he refused to bargain-hunt, paying top dollar even when the sellers were unaware of market value. ―I had a

good relationship with various relatives and, quite frankly, was able to acquire really limited editions. These were works that were never seen. I took the position that when you see some of them, just go for them, because if you don‘t go for them, they cannot be collected en masse. I just pursued them whenever I could.‖ In 2002, the heart of the Garfield‘s collection formed the exhibition ―From Paris to Provincetown: Blanche Lazzell and the Color Woodcut‖ at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, which traveled to Cleveland and the University of Wisconsin, where the couple met as undergraduates.

―A visit to the home of Leslie and Johanna Garfield confirms both their passion for the prints of Blanche Lazzell in particular, and their interest in complementing her work with fine examples of her Provincetown contemporaries,‖ noted MFA director Malcolm Rogers at the time of the show. ―Multiple impressions with different colorations, as well as numerous drawings and carved woodblocks, constitute a collection of glowing examples from one of the most extraordinary print productions in the years between the two world wars.‖ Much of the Garfields‘ print collection, which they say will never be sold, is promised to the MFA along with other institutions. Some prints have already left the apartment. ―We have given some to some museums,‖ says Jo. ―It‘s like sending a child away to boarding school.‖

For Les, the energy for the chase separates him from the ordinary art buyer. It also speaks to the energy he has exhibited in his professional life. From canvasing door-to-door in the Bronx for potential home sellers, Les built his own boutique real estate firm, Leslie J. Garfield & Co., which specializes in brokering high-end New York buildings and townhouses. Jo is an acclaimed journalist and memoirist who both directs the collection and casts a writer‘s eye on her husband‘s collecting drive. ―I often think if he had to give up me or the collection, I‘m not sure which he would choose,‖ she says, noting that Les‘s father, an avid collector of shells and toy cars, started Les

Blanche Lazzell, The Pile Driver, 1935

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on a stamp collection. ―Collecting runs in the blood. He‘s like that about things. If he‘s interested, he is intensely involved.‖

―Once we‘ve localized who we‘re interested in, it‘s just about going after them and showing them to Jo,‖ Les says of his method. ―Over this period of years, we‘re in sync with each other.‖ Together their collecting tastes have taken them through the prints of Jasper Johns and David Hockney, the British pop artist Richard Hamilton, and other contemporary British artists. Through the Provincetown artists, they discovered a circle of British printmakers working between the wars known as the Grosvenor School, with dynamic colorful works and today the jewel in the crown of the collection. These works by the artists Cyril Power, Sybil Andrews, C.R.W. Nevinson, Edward Wadsworth and others took the conventions of Futurism and Cubism and applied them to depicting the energy of British life between the wars. ―We both latched onto the Grovensor School with mutual enthusiasm,‖ says Les. In 2008, the Garfields‘ Grosvenor prints formed the heart of the eye-popping exhibition ―Rhythms of Modern Life: British Prints 1914–1939,‖ which

was on view at the MFA Boston and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

―No other collector in the United States has continued to pursue this area with as much energy and single-mindedness,‖ noted curator Stephen Coppel of the British Museum. ―Long before the current high visibility of contemporary British art, the Garfields were collecting British avant-garde prints, at a time when American museums were generally reluctant to acquire them.‖

―The Garfields were exceptional in that they could follow their own hearts ahead of the museums. Now the museums have caught up,‖ says the New York dealer Mary Ryan, who first met them three decades ago as they were collecting the Provincetown prints and continued working with them on the Grosvenor school. ―There are always many people interested to collect what is hot at the moment, but it is thrilling when you have a collector who wants to build a collection over a lifetime. They both enjoy the solo process of collecting and the pleasure of living with art. It‘s a constant pursuit. Their interest hasn‘t waned over the years; it‘s expanded and deepened.‖

And the reason for that continued interest? Simple, says Jo. ―Collecting is a form of madness. It‘s not a bad obsession. It‘s not a drug addiction. It‘s a good obsession. It keeps you out of trouble.‖

Edward Wadsworth, Interior 1917

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WALKER STEPS INTO ART CENSORSHIP FIRE

By Mary Abbe - StarTribune-December 15, 2010

A controversial artist's film, banned in Washington, D.C., is coming to Minneapolis.

Walker Art Center has stepped into an art controversy that has been simmering for two weeks in the nation's capital. Olga Viso, director of the Walker, on Tuesday released a statement that criticized a Smithsonian museum for removing a video from an exhibition after a Catholic group called it anti-Christian. She said the Walker would offer free screenings of the video starting later this week and running through Dec. 31.

Directors of the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) removed the film, which includes a short scene of ants crawling across a crucifix that is lying on the ground, after the Catholic League, a private advocacy organization, condemned the work as a form of "hate speech." Several House Republicans also criticized the show.

Viso flew to Washington Monday to see the NPG's exhibition, "Hide/Seek," which examines changing attitudes toward sexual identity in the work of more than 100 artists, both gay and straight.

The film was an excerpt from "A Fire in My Belly" by David Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS-related illness in 1992. He made the 13-minute film in 1987, by which time he had become an outspoken AIDS activist.

Viso called "Hide/Seek" a "groundbreaking, scholarly exhibition" and condemned the NPG's "surprising" decision to remove Wojnarowicz's piece. She was unavailable for comment Tuesday, but said on the

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Walker's website that she was "saddened" that Washington was now "informed by fear, intolerance, and silence." The Smithsonian's removal of the video had compromised its core principles, Viso wrote.

At least 10 other American museums, from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to the New Museum in New York, also made plans this week to show the video or to hold discussions about artistic censorship.

The show opened Oct. 30 at the NPG and ran for a month without controversy until Catholic League President William Donohue issued a sarcastic critique of Wojnarowicz's film on Nov. 30. "We call it hate speech," Donohue said in a statement.

The ant scene "was part of a surrealistic video collage filmed in Mexico expressing the suffering, marginalization and physical decay of those who were afflicted with AIDS," according to a Smithsonian statement. To see the video, visitors had to "optionally access" a small touch screen in the exhibit. The Smithsonian said Wojnarowicz's work was part of a long tradition of religious imagery used "to universalize human suffering."

Flashback to culture wars

To some, the controversy is a flashback to the "culture wars" of the 1980s in which conservative politicians attacked cultural institutions for exhibiting photos by Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano, or for staging performances on gay issues. In 1994 a Walker-sponsored event by California-performance artist Ron Athey sparked a year-long controversy that prompted funding cuts and a reorganization of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Some critics of the show at the Portrait Gallery suggested that taxpayers should not foot the bill for material they deemed objectionable. While the museum receives tax dollars as part of the Smithsonian complex, this exhibition was entirely paid for by individuals and private foundations.

The film triggered a "very vehement response from the Catholic League" including "quite offensive and aggressive statements that were frankly too disgusting to respond to or to keep," said Kaywin Feldman, president of the Association of Art Museum Directors and director of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Feldman has not seen the exhibit but, after studying its catalogue and website, said it appeared to be a "very thoughtful exploration of portraiture and identity."

"We absolutely deplore the pressure to remove the video from the exhibition," said Feldman. "It's an exploitation of art museums by individuals for their own political agenda. Unfortunately, by removing the work of art, the Smithsonian got caught in the crossfire."

The Andy Warhol Foundation, which provided $100,000 for the show, threatened to stop funding Smithsonian shows if the film is not returned to the exhibit. Viso was director of the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum before joining the Walker and also sits on the Warhol's board of directors.

Coincidentally the Walker is also showing a lithograph by Wojnarowicz in a new exhibit, "50/50," opening Thursday. The lithograph is one of 50 works from the Walker's collection that were chosen by public vote for inclusion.

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Entertainment

COSBY CAN LAUGH NOW, BUT FOOTBALL WAS SERIOUS BUSINESS By George Vecsey-New York Times-December 4th, 2010

Bill Cosby dreamed about football for most of his life — often playing better than he had at Temple University decades earlier. Then, at 61, he found himself playing for the Giants, and opponents kept running past him. ―I have not lined up since,‖ he said in that familiar husky voice. ―You‘re free now!‖ the voice announced. Free from football dreams, perhaps, but not from football memories. The sport has been linked with Cosby,

now 73, since he was first noticed in the early ‘60s, wearing a cherry-red Temple sweatshirt while working clubs in Philadelphia and New York. ―It made me walk from the dressing room to the stage,‖ he whispered about football‘s place in his life. ―There would be no fear — unless I put that fear in myself.‖ On Tuesday, Cosby will be awarded the National Football Foundation‘s Gold Medal and Tom Brokaw will receive its Distinguished American award at a dinner in New York. In an hourlong telephone interview, Cosby recalled his first football advice from his grandfather Samuel Russell Cosby, the patriarch in the absence of Cosby‘s father. The grandfather would take the trolley to visit his grandson in the projects, passing along portentous advice like: ―Do. Not. Play. Football.‖ The reason? ―Your. Bones. Are. Not. Set. Yet.‖ The boy weighed 123 pounds but went out for football at Central High. And promptly broke his left shoulder. A few days later, the grandfather came by and spotted the boy lying on a sofa, a cast on his shoulder. ―He came over and kissed me on the forehead,‖ Cosby said. ―I set my ears to listen. He never said, ‗I told you, Junior.‘ He always kept his money in his sock. He reached in and gave me a quarter and put it in my right hand and said: ‗Get yourself some ice cream. It‘s got calcium in it.‘ ‖ The boy did not miss the rebuke: always listen to your grandfather. Football did not keep Cosby in high school. ―I had no life ahead of me,‖ he said darkly. He wound up in the Navy, earning an equivalency diploma, tending to the wounded in a military hospital.

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He applied for a track and field scholarship at Temple but had to take the SAT. The questions flitted around him. ―All those things, like ghosts of Christmas past,‖ Cosby said. ―I was put in remedial everything.‖ He played freshman football. ―I‘m around 185,‖ he said. ―I think I am a good running back, but I‘m really not that fast. There is only one thing I can do, that is throw a cross-body block. Picture perfect. I love it. Not that good at pass blocking.‖ He remembered one hit he took, turning into ―caterpillar fuzz.‖ As he lay on the ground, ―I started to feel my legs and I said, ‗Oh, my God, I‘m paralyzed.‘ If I don‘t try to move, I‘ll never know if I‘m paralyzed, so I stay there. ―My trainer says, ‗Ask him his name.‘ Dumbest thing I ever heard. I said, ‗Rumpelstiltskin,‘ and Coach said, ‗He‘s all right!‘ I got up and the field was tilting. Somebody tapped me and said, ‗You have to go off the field.‘ ‖ Just about everybody at the dinner Tuesday will identify with that hit. Temple won five games, lost 11 and tied two in Cosby‘s two seasons. He harbors two memories of himself in action. At Gettysburg, he said, Temple had a fourth-and-1. The call was to dive straight up the middle, but Cosby went for the improv — to the left side, and was stuffed. That was bad enough, but on Monday, the coaches produced a film of a lineman opening a hole up the middle — ―like a railroad train,‖ he said. Cosby balanced that memory with a play against Toledo. Playing right cornerback, he burst across the line and hit the ball carrier. ―I stayed on my feet,‖ he said. ―I hit the guy. He had the ball. When we met, I put my body on his and, wham, that guy had no leg power. The ref blew the whistle.‖ Meantime, Cosby was tending bar and telling jokes, and before long, he was working in Greenwich Village, ―The Gaslight Cafe at 116 MacDougal Street; Minetta Tavern; the Fat Black Pussycat,‖ he recited with reverence. He told his coaches he was giving up football. ―Showbiz, man, showbiz.‖ He told about playing basketball at the playground on West Fourth Street and having his mostly absent father materialize, urging him to go back and play football. ―My father said, ‗Junior, it takes a man to play football, but any fool can get up on the stage and make an ass of himself.‘ ‖

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In Cosby‘s version, he gave his father some money and said the next installment would be for a coffin. The pain behind the story is palpable. As Cosby told it, the decision to stop playing was also about getting a real education. ―If I just get a C, I‘m not going to know anything,‖ he said. It was still the early ‘60s. Most professional athletes, particularly black men, were not making money. ―I‘m going to be a schoolteacher,‖ he said. ―I‘m going to tell ‘em what they‘re missing.‖ In his long and successful career, Cosby has been a star of ―I Spy‖and the father on ―The Cosby Show,‖ and he has entertained on comedy records and talk shows. He received a degree from Temple, then two advanced degrees in education from the University of Massachusetts: a master‘s in 1972 and a doctorate in 1977. In recent years, Cosby has been an advocate of blacks‘ aspiring to education, getting the most out of this society.

Through it all, he said, he has only minor aches from his few years of football. ―My left shoulder, forget jumping jacks,‖ Cosby said. ―My tailbone took a couple of hits and, as I think about it, the nose was moved a couple of times.‖ But nothing compared with the artificial joints and brain damage of people who played longer. Still a fan of resurgent Temple, Cosby said he could barely follow the complexities of the sport, and when Franco Harris took him into the Steelers‘ locker room he could not imagine his neck supporting the modern weapon-helmet. He sounded boggled by the financial machinations and allegations involving Heisman-level players. He was asked one final meaning-of-life question: what did football teach him? ―Obedience and hope,‖ Cosby said. And education. ―Put yourself in the position so that with tuition and books, you can multiply things by pi.‖ And still remember the good plays and the bad plays, and maybe the dream plays, too.

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HOLIDAY BOOKS: MOVIES Review by Dana Stevens-New York Times Book Review –December 5th-2010

No Marx Brothers movie exemplifies the divine anarchy of Julius, Leonard, Arthur and Herbert Marx as purely as the 1933 Paramount comedy ―Duck Soup.‖ It was the last film in which all four brothers — stage-named Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Zeppo — appeared together on-screen. Unlike their earlier Paramount films (or those that would come after their move to MGM the following year), ―Duck Soup‖ is devoid of romantic subplots or, for that matter, of any real plotline at all, save for the foundering of the bankrupt kingdom of Freedonia in a senseless, and quite conceivably endless, Groucho-led war. Yet ―Duck Soup‖ is the film Harold Bloom, in an essay on ―the 20th-century American sublime,‖ called one of the great works of art of the past century. It‘s one of the movies T. S. Eliot wanted to discuss when he met with Groucho in 1964 (Groucho had hoped to chat about ―Murder in the Cathedral‖), and the one that inspired Woody Allen‘s character in ―Hannah and Her Sisters‖ not to go home and shoot himself. In HAIL, HAIL, EUPHORIA! Presenting the Marx Brothers in “Duck Soup,” the Greatest War Movie Ever Made (It Books/HarperCollins, $19.99), the humorist Roy Blount Jr. takes on ―Duck Soup,‖ not as a film critic or as a culture pundit or even as a comedy writer, but as a passionate amateur fan. To call this 144-page essay informal would be a Groucho-esque understatement. Blount, by his own admission, opens up the movie in a window on his computer and, in essence, ―live blogs‖ it, free-associating in the raggedly discursive style proper to that form. Blount is no more bothered by the Aristotelian unities of time, place and action than were the brothers themselves. An eagle-shaped logo that appears on screen for a few seconds before the movie begins — the symbol of Franklin Delano Roosevelt‘s National Recovery Administration — gets four pages, while whole scenes from the film rush by in a quick sentence or two.

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Folksy, warm and up on his Marx lore — he seems not only to have seen every one of the brothers‘ movies, but to have read early drafts of every script — Blount makes for swell company. But his single biggest insight — that ―Duck Soup‖ is at heart ―a family drama, a true bromance,‖ a movie not so much about how nations go to war as about ―the way brothers fight, compulsively, appetitively, because they can‘t help it‖ — never quite rises to the level of a theory. Rather than explore the idea of ―Duck Soup‖ as a comedy of fraternal aggression, Blount tosses it into the fracas and rushes on, seeming to forget it altogether. (A related, and equally tantalizing, notion — that the omnipresent straight woman Margaret Dumont functioned as a more compliant, fictional version of the boys‘ formidable mother, Minnie — remains similarly underdeveloped.) The extreme casualness of Blount‘s approach leaves room for some sloppiness to sneak in. Recalling that scene of circumvented suicide in ―Hannah and Her Sisters,‖ Blount repeatedly refers to the Woody Allen character as Alvy

Singer, which was in fact the name of his character in ―Annie Hall.‖ But it‘s hard to gainsay the profound joy Blount takes in the brothers‘ inspired clowning, especially during his delightfully erudite exegesis of the justly famous ―mirror scene.‖ In this nearly three-minute-long sight gag, Harpo and Groucho enact a classic vaudeville routine, mirroring each other‘s gestures from either side of a threshold, to a soundtrack of absolute, music-free silence. Blount‘s joke-by-joke analysis of the mirror scene brings in — and makes fruitful use of — analogous moments in Charlie Chaplin, George Méliès, ―Hamlet‖ and Bugs Bunny. But best of all is his stage-setting invitation for the reader to view the scene with him in silence: ―A hush falls. Two brothers, in nightgowns, dance, as one. It is absurd. It can‘t be happening. It is a beautiful thing. Let‘s watch it now, and talk about it after.‖

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TELEVISION

NEW YORK STREET GAMES

Neil Genzlinger –New York Times Sunday Magazine-November 28, 2010 The documentary ''NEW YORK STREET GAMES'' (WLIW, Sunday, 5:30 p.m.-the DVD can be ordered from their website), about stickball and other recreations once common in the city's neighborhoods, is one warm bit of nostalgia after another. But it reaches a wonderfully wistful high point when, about 20 minutes in, the celebrities, public officials and other aficionados who are sharing their memories wax eloquent about the Spaldeen, the bouncing pink ball vital to so many of the games. Ray Romano, Whoopi Goldberg and Dr. C. Everett Koop are among a diverse group of interviewees who discuss the fine art of buying the ball, hitting the ball and fishing the ball out of storm drains. Spaldeen is a street skewing of Spalding, the manufacturer, something that Ms. Goldberg, at least, seems to figure out only as she's being interviewed for this film, which is directed by Matt Levy and narrated by the actor Hector Elizondo. Not all the games were played with a Spaldeen. There was Johnny on a Pony, in which one group of youngsters would pile onto another. ''I could play that once now and I'd be in the emergency room,'' Mr. Romano says.

. PHOTO: ''New York Street Games,'' on WLIW on Sunday, covers Johnny on a Pony, above, and other urban pastimes. (PHOTOGRAPH BY ARTHUR LEIPZIG)

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books

Book review: 'Unbroken' by Laura Hillenbrand

The author of 'Seabiscuit' relates the stirring and triumphant account of the harrowing experiences of American Olympic runner and World War II prisoner-of-war Louis Zamperini. November 28, 2010|By Jane Ciabattari | Special to the Los Angeles Times Unbroken-A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption As I read Laura Hillenbrand's stirring and triumphant account of the harrowing experiences of American Olympic runner and World War II POW Louis Zamperini, I thought of the double load that the research and writing of "Unbroken" had put on its author. Hillenbrand is herself a steely example of triumph over more than 23 years of debilitating illness. She won a National Magazine Award for "A Sudden Illness," a 2003 article in the New Yorker which describes her battle with chronic fatigue syndrome. The author of "Seabiscuit" (a bestseller-turned-Oscar-nominated 2003 film) and "Unbroken" has transmuted her own life struggle into two irresistible stories about athletes gifted with preternatural speed who overcome severe handicaps to achieve victory. Talk about transcending obstacles. Like Seabiscuit, the legendary thoroughbred champion, Louie Zamperini's early years of athletic success — shattering the national high school record for a mile in 1934 and running a 56-second last lap in the 5,000-meter race at the 1936 Berlin Olympics at age 19 — brought him to national attention during the struggling Depression years.

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Hillenbrand tells his story as a nearly continuous flow of suspense. She opens with a gripping two-page glimpse of Army Air Forces bombardier Zamperini in mortal danger, lying on a raft in the Pacific on June 23, 1943. He and three other survivors of a plane crash are gaunt after 27 days at sea: "Sharks glided in lazy loops around them, dragging their backs along the rafts, waiting." Spotting a plane, Zamperini fires off two flares only to discover that it is a Japanese bomber. Strafing begins. After that powerful scene, "Unbroken" gallops along at full speed for another 330 pages, the first four sections of the book. Hillenbrand gives us the 12-year-old Zamperini, the son of Italian immigrants, spotting the German dirigible Graf Zeppelin hovering over his backyard in Torrance like a ghostly image of his future. Looping back, Hillenbrand shows how Zamperini was untamable from birth. "From earliest childhood, he fought every curb on his freedom," she writes. "Every rule set before him, every thwarted desire, was an irresistible invitation to defiance." By high school, his energy harnessed by his older brother's suggestion that he try track, he had become one of the fastest runners on Earth. He was a juggernaut on USC's track team, smashing the NCAA record in 1938 while running with a cracked rib and puncture wounds to both legs and one foot. He bested world-class miler Glenn Cunningham twice in 1940 and seemed destined to be the first to break the four-minute-mile barrier. The only runner who could beat him was Seabiscuit, his coach said. Then the 1940 Olympics were canceled, and Zamperini went to war. Zamperini's childhood "shaped who he would be in manhood," Hillenbrand writes. "Confident that he was clever, resourceful, and bold enough to escape any predicament, he was almost incapable of discouragement. When history carried him into war, this resilient optimism would define him." As a bombardier, Zamperini was confined mostly to the B-24, nicknamed the "Flying Coffin," for its frequent mechanical failures. From his first bombing run, during a Dec. 23, 1942, American raid on the Japanese base on Wake Island , to his crash landing in the Pacific while on a rescue mission in 1943, his flying time was measured only in months. Zamperini would spend 47 days at sea before being captured by the Japanese. From then until the war's end in 1945, he was engaged in a hair-raising struggle to survive. He was imprisoned at such infamous prisoner-of-war camps as the one on Kwajalein Atoll (nicknamed "Execution Island") and the secret interrogation center Ofuna. Murderously sadistic guards, starvation rations and bloody dysentery all whittled away at his body and soul. Finally, he wound up at Naoetsu POW camp northwest of Tokyo, where a psychotic prison official known as "The Bird" made it his mission to break Zamperini down. Hillenbrand's vivid accounts of battles, technological advances such as the top-secret Norden bombsight, explanations of Japanese policy toward POWs (including a "kill-all" order at war's end) as well as her footnotes and acknowledgments detailing her research are all worthy of careful reading. But it is the tension of Zamperini's fight to live in barbaric conditions that makes "Unbroken" so disturbing and thrilling. A novelist might have ended "Unbroken" with the war's end. Hillenbrand adds a fifth act, showing how echoes of Zamperini's captivity shaped the decades after his release and how a meeting with Billy Graham helped him to claim a lasting victory over his deep emotional wounds.

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Movies

127 HOURS What else was he gonna do?

Ebert Rating: **** By Roger Ebert Nov 10, 2010

James Franco as Aron Ralston

Sometimes a person will make an enormous mistake and get a lot of time to think about it. There was a man who went over Niagara Falls sealed inside a big rubber ball. It never made it to the bottom. The ball lodged somewhere on the way down. He‘d counted on his team to cut him out after he landed. Oops! Aron Ralston, the hero of "127 Hours," had an oops! moment. That‘s even what he calls it. He went hiking in the wilderness without telling anyone where he was going, and then in a

deep, narrow crevice, got his forearm trapped between a boulder and the canyon wall. Oops.

We all heard about this. Ralston stumbled out to safety more than five days later, having cut off his own right arm to escape. He is an upbeat and resilient person and has returned to rock climbing, although now, I trust, after filing a plan, going with a companion and not leaving his Swiss Army Knife behind. The knife would have been ever so much more convenient than his multipurpose tool. I imagine that every time he considers his missing right forearm, he feels that under the circumstances he‘s better off without it. What would you have done? What about me? I don‘t know if I could have done it. It involves a gruesome ordeal for Ralston, and for the film‘s audience, a few of whom have been said to faint. But from such harrowing beginnings, it‘s rather awesome what an entertaining film Danny Boyle has made with "127 Hours." Yes, entertaining. For most of the film he deals with one location and one actor, James Franco. There‘s a carefree prologue in which Ralston and a couple of young woman hikers have a swim in an underwater cavern. Later, during moments of hallucination, other people from his life seem to visit. But the fundamental reality is expressed in the title of the book he wrote about his experience: Between a Rock and a Hard Place. Franco does a good job of suggesting two aspects of Ralston‘s character. (1) He‘s a cocky, bold adventurer who trusts his skills and likes taking chances, and (2) he‘s logical and bloody-minded enough to cut through his own skin and bone to save his life. One aspect gets him into his problem, and the other gets him out. Is the film watchable? Yes, compulsively. Films like this don‘t move quickly or slowly, they seem to take place all in the same moment. They prey on our own deep fear of being trapped somewhere and understanding that there doesn‘t seem to be any way to escape. Edgar Allan Poe mined this vein in several different ways. Ralston is at least fortunate to be standing on a secure foothold; one can imagine the

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boulder falling and leaving him dangling in mid-air from the trapped arm. Suddenly, his world has become very well-defined. There is the crevice. There is the strip of sky above, crossed by an eagle on its regular flight path. There are the things he brought with him: a video camera, some water, a little food, his inadequate little tool. It doesn‘t take long to make an inventory. He shouts for help, but who can hear? The two women campers have long since gone their way and won‘t report him missing because they won‘t realize that he is. For anyone to happen to find him is unthinkable. He will die or do something. "127 Hours" is like an exercise in conquering the unfilmable. Boyle uses magnificent cinematography by Anthony Dod Mantle and Enrique Chediak, establishing the vastness of the Utah wilderness, and the very specific details of Ralston‘s small portion of it. His editor, Jon Harris, achieves the delicate task of showing an arm being cut through without ever quite showing it. For the audience the worst moment is not a sight but a sound. Most of us have never heard that sound before, but we know exactly what it is. Pain and bloodshed are so common in the movies. They are rarely amped up to the level of reality, because we want to be entertained, not sickened. We and the heroes feel immune. "127 Hours" removes the filters. It implicates us. By identification, we are trapped in the canyon, we are cutting into our own flesh. One element that film can suggest but not evoke is the brutality of the pain involved. I can‘t even imagine what it felt like. Maybe that made it easier for Ralston, because in one way or another, his decision limited the duration of his suffering. He must be quite a man. The film deliberately doesn‘t make him a hero — more of a capable athlete trapped by a momentary decision. He cuts off his arm because he has to. He was lucky to succeed. One can imagine a news story of his body being discovered long afterward, with his arm only partly cut through. He did what he had to do, which doesn‘t make him a hero. We could do it, too. Oh, yes, we could.

[Editor‘s note]

I understand that many potential attendees we‘re scared off by the previews of this film showing the trapped mountain explorer who cut off his arm to escape with his life. The horror of watching his self-mutilation appeared too graphic for the squeamish, women and children. However, my extremely hypersensitive to violence wife attended the film with me and outside of a few peek-a-boos to blur the home-made resection; she loved it and even offered to view the film again with our daughter and son-in-law to make sure the star cuts off the same left arm-right?

For sure many Academy Award nominations and likely a handful of actual winners! i.e.

Best Cinematography? Best Male actor in a drama? Best Movie?

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Obituaries

MEMORIES OF ELAINE: AN APPRECIATION By Peter Khoury-New York Times- December 3, 2010

One Saturday night this spring, a limber woman eating dinner at Elaine‘s walked up to Table 4, bent very low, and reached out her hand to pay her respects to the imposing woman seated there. The limber woman was Jane Fonda; the imposing one, Elaine Kaufman. Farewell Elaine Perhaps it‘s inevitable that any story about Elaine must include a celebrity sighting, given the many luminaries who passed through the doors of her Upper East Side restaurant in the 47 years that she ran it. Or at least a tale about some of the bons mots that she tossed around with the ease of her buddy Alan King. (On St. Patrick‘s Day last year, a

drunken man wearing a tall hat stumbled in and collapsed on the bar. ―Hey Gianni,‖ Elaine called out to the maître d‘. ―Who came here to die?‖) With Elaine‘s passing on Friday, memories of the many entertaining nights spent in her place and of her one-liners are coming to mind as quickly as the Heinekens that Alex and Duffy line up at the bar. But in reflecting on what Elaine — and Elaine‘s — meant to the many who use the place as a sort of club, it is too easy to fall back on any one story. The true nature of the woman was to encourage a sort of creative community where one person‘s strength feeds another‘s; where generations commingle; where the music is generally soft enough that you can actually hold a thing called a conversation; and where, once the talk dies down at one table, you‘re welcome at the next. So maybe it‘s the sightings of people like Jack Nicholson or Mick Jagger that land Elaine‘s in the gossip columns. The most memorable nights there are ones on which regulars come together, often by serendipity. Even on a slow, celebrity-less night, you can be regaled by one friend who‘s a comedian, serenaded by another who‘s a Broadway actress and singer, entertained by gritty tales told by ex-cops, and put in stitches by a hotel bartender who drives down from the Bronx and is funny enough that a television producer who met him told Elaine: ―This guy‘s great; who represents him?‖ It‘s a place where a half-century can separate the youngest and oldest patrons at the bar; where a top-notch photographer has accumulated pictures of fellow patrons for years; where someone can, perchance, find fleeting romance — or at least get a decent news tip. Despite Elaine Kaufman‘s reputation for being outspoken, she was much more interested in what others had to say. On any given night, she would move from one table to another, her eyes darting around to take

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in the action. She would occasionally bark out an order to a waiter, and sometimes would quietly dispense advice to favored patrons. (―Watch out for that one — she‘s a killer!‖) Regulars who spent time at a table with Elaine learned quickly that she liked to introduce people who she thought might get along. They, in turn, would introduce you to others. Those who don‘t know Elaine‘s will say that this type of camaraderie can be found at any number of saloons and restaurants. But the regulars at Elaine‘s understand that it is something special. The odds of sharing a moment with someone who brings something to the table are just better there — and that is no accident. A tough businesswoman, Elaine always nurtured interesting people, and she was loyal to her friends. One night a few years ago, a writer attending a party at Elaine‘s handed her an envelope and asked her to wait till he was gone to open it. When she did, she found a letter explaining that the writer‘s father, a onetime customer who had fallen on hard times, had hosted a celebratory meal there years earlier but had been unable to pay for it. Elaine had picked up the tab. Along with the letter was a check from the writer to pay for that long-ago meal. Like many who are great at what they do, Elaine always lived in fear of failure, worried that the next evening no customers would show up. She was at her restaurant nearly every night. A onetime world traveler, she was highly adventurous and constantly entertained by the human interaction inside. ―Youse opens the door,‖ she‘d say, ―youse takes your chances.‖ When she left the restaurant in the wee hours, Elaine liked to just slip out — no fanfare. She wanted the party to continue without her. Maybe it can, but certainly the best part is over.

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Sidney Levinsohn

Levinsohn, Sidney Born 1/17/1929. Preceded in

death by parents, Dorothy and Max Levinsohn

and special Uncle, Nate Levinsohn. Survived

by wife of 51 years, Joanie; sons, Craig (Rachel

Banken) and Loren (Shari); grandchildren,

Erica, Andrew, Noah, Lucas and Haylee; sister-

in- law, Helen Hurwitz (Jack) and nephew,

Randy Hurwitz (Barbara Van Antwerp); special

cousins, Steven and Pat; numerous extended

families and friends, as well as treasured

medical advisors, Arnie Kaplan and Irv Katz.

Sid was a truly amazing husband, father and

grandfather who left a legacy that's impossible

to put into words. He had passion, integrity,

values and a commitment to leave the world in

a better place. Through his non-profit

organization, Quiet Miracles, Sid tirelessly

gave his time and energy to thousands of people afflicted with chronic illness. He was also the

former CEO of PCA and a Captain in the U.S. Air Force. Sid gave this world so much more than

he took and was an inspiration to all who knew him. He will be sorely missed. Funeral service

TUESDAY 2PM at TEMPLE ISRAEL, 2324 Emerson Ave. S., Mpls. Donations preferred to

Quiet Miracles or The Joanie and Sidney Levinsohn Family Fund at JFCS. SHIVA, Temple

Israel (Tue & Wed at 7 PM). Hodroff-Epstein 612-871-1234

Published in Star Tribune from January 3 to January 4, 2011

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humor

56

Somali Pirates Refuse to Board Carnival

Cruise Ships

Cite ‘Unsafe Working Conditions’

MOGADISHU (borowitzreport.com) – In yet

another public relations setback for the

beleaguered cruise ship company, Somali

pirates today said they would no longer board

Carnival Cruise ships, citing “unsafe working

conditions.”

“If Carnival thinks that it’s going to be

business as usual between them and the Somali

pirates, they need to have their heads

examined,” said Somali pirate spokesman

Sugule. “We Somali pirates may be bold, but

we’re not crazy.”

The pirate said that the recent fire that crippled

the giant cruise ship Carnival Splendor “has

sent a shiver through the pirate community.”

“We Somali pirates face enough risks without dealing with decks bursting into flames,” he

said. “And don’t get me started on the nonfunctioning toilets.”

When asked if the Somali pirates might attempt to board Carnival ships in the future, he

responded, “I am telling me hearties that if they were thinking of pillaging a Carnival ship of its

booty over the holidays, they should make alternative plans.”

Carol Foyler, a spokesperson for Carnival Cruises, said that the company “would be working

overtime to win back the pirates’ trust.”In the meantime, Ms. Foyler said, Carnival would be

unveiling a new slogan in the weeks to come: “Come for the fun, stay for the raging inferno.”

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Borowitz Report Names its Person of the Year

Alaska Governor Sarah Palin

NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report) – The Borowitz Report has named Sarah Palin its Person

of the Year.

And the year is 1641

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WHY ATHLETES CAN'T HAVE REGULAR JOBS..................... 1. Chicago Cubs outfielder Andre Dawson on being a role model: "I wan' all dem kids to do what I do, to look up to me. I wan' all the kids to copulate me." 2. New Orleans Saint RB George Rogers when asked about the upcoming season: "I want to rush for 1,000 or 1,500 yards, whichever comes first." 3. And, upon hearing Joe Jacobi of the 'Skin's say: "I'd run over my own mother to win the Super Bowl," Matt Millen of the Raiders said: "To win, I'd run over Joe's Mom, too." 4. Torrin Polk, University of Houston receiver, on his coach, John Jenkins: "He treats us like men. He lets us wear earrings.."

5. Football commentator and former player Joe Theismann: "Nobody in football should be called a genius. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein." 6. Senior basketball player at the University of Pittsburgh : "I'm going to graduate on time, no matter how long it takes." (Now that is beautiful) 7. Bill Peterson, a Florida State football coach: "You guys line up alphabetically by height.." And, "You guys pair up in groups of three, and then line up in a circle." 8. Boxing promoter Dan Duva on Mike Tyson going to prison: "Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton ." 9. Stu Grimson, Chicago Blackhawks left wing, explaining why he keeps a color photo of himself above his locker: "That's so when I forget how to spell my name, I can still find my clothes." 10. Lou Duva, veteran boxing trainer, on the Spartan training regimen of heavyweight Andrew Golota: "He's a guy who gets up at six o'clock in the morning, regardless of what time it is."

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11. Chuck Nevitt , North Carolina State basketball player, explaining to Coach Jim Valvano why he appeared nervous at practice: "My sister's expecting a baby, and I don't know if I'm going to be an uncle or an aunt." (I wonder if his IQ ever hit room temperature in January) 12. Frank Layden, Utah Jazz president, on a former player: "I asked him, 'Son, what is it with you? Is it ignorance or apathy?' He said, 'Coach, I don't know and I don't care.'" 13. Shelby Metcalf, basketball coach at Texas A&M, recounting what he told a player who received four F's and one D: "Son, looks to me like you're spending too much time on one subject." 14. In the words of NC State great Charles Shackelford: I can go to my left or right, I am amphibious. 15. Amarillo High School and Oiler coach Bum Phillips when asked by Bob Costas why he takes his wife on all the road trips, Phillips responded: "Because she is too ugly to kiss good-bye."

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HELLO GARY AND JOANN - THANK YOU SO

MUCH FOR THE 2ND SWEATER. I AM

WEARING IT UNDER MY HALLOWEEN

COSTUME IN THE PICTURE. VERY NICE

SWEATERS AND THEY ARE NOT MADE IN

CHINA - GO PERU !!!!

JIM

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“Are you in on the heist or are you just driving the get-away car?”

No French kissing the Inhabitants!

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THE COMIC ART OF JERRY VAN AMERONGEN

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GARY IS PLEASED WITH HOW HIS VARIOUS BODY PARTS HANDLED THE DAY!

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Opinion

BROKEN BEYOND REPAIR By Bob Herbert-New York Times-November 29th, 2010

You can only hope that you will be as sharp and intellectually focused as former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens when you‘re 90 years old. In a provocative essay in The New York Review of Books, the former justice, who once supported the death penalty, offers some welcome insight into why he now opposes this ultimate criminal sanction and believes it to be unconstitutional. As Adam Liptak noted in The Times on Sunday, Justice Stevens had once thought the death penalty could be administered rationally and fairly but has come to the conclusion ―that personnel changes on the court, coupled with ‗regrettable judicial activism,‘ had created a system of capital punishment that is shot through with racism, skewed toward

conviction, infected with politics and tinged with hysteria.‖ The egregious problems identified by Justice Stevens (and other prominent Americans who have changed their minds in recent years about capital punishment) have always been the case. The awful evidence has always been right there for all to see, but mostly it has been ignored. The death penalty in the United States has never been anything but an abomination — a grotesque, uncivilized, overwhelmingly racist affront to the very idea of justice. Police and prosecutorial misconduct have been rampant, with evidence of innocence deliberately withheld from defendants being prominent among the abuses. Juries have systematically been shaped — rigged — to heighten the chances of conviction, and thus imposition of the ultimate punishment. Prosecutors and judges in death penalty cases have been overwhelmingly white and male and their behavior has often — not always, but shockingly often — been unfair, bigoted and cruel. The Death Penalty Information Center has reams of meticulously documented horror stories. Innocents have undoubtedly been executed. Executions have been upheld in cases in which defense lawyers slept through crucial proceedings. Alcoholic, drug-addicted and incompetent lawyers — as well as lawyers who had been suspended or otherwise disciplined for misconduct — have been assigned to indigent defendants. And it has always been the case that the death penalty machinery is fired up far more often when the victims are white. I remember reporting on a study several years ago by the Texas Defender Service, which represented indigent death row inmates. It mentioned a Dallas defense lawyer, who, reminiscing in 2000, said: ―At one point, with a black-on-black murder, you could get it dismissed if the defendant would pay funeral expenses.‖ A judge, looking back on his days as a prosecutor in the 1950s, recalled being told by an angry boss: ―If you ever put another nigger on a jury, you‘re fired.‖

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Prosecutors cleaned up their language somewhat over the years, but the discrimination has persisted, along with the pernicious idea that white lives are inherently more valuable than black ones. Patricia Lemay, a white juror in a Georgia death penalty case that resulted in an execution, told me in an interview in 2002 that she had been nauseated by the vile racial comments made by other jurors during the deliberations. Justice Harry Blackmun was 85 years old and near the end of his tenure on the Supreme Court when he declared in 1994 that he could no longer support the imposition of the death penalty. ―The problem,‖ he said, ―is that the inevitability of factual, legal and moral error gives us a system that we know must wrongly kill some defendants, a system that fails to deliver the fair, consistent and reliable sentences of death required by the Constitution.‖ Justice Blackmun vowed that he would no longer participate in a system ―fraught with arbitrariness, discrimination, caprice and mistake.‖ In 1990, Justice Thurgood Marshall asserted: ―When in Gregg v. Georgia the Supreme Court gave its seal of approval to capital punishment, this endorsement was premised on the promise that capital punishment would be administered with fairness and justice. Instead, the promise has become a cruel and empty

mockery.‖ Justices Blackmun and Marshall are gone, but the death penalty is still with us. It is still an abomination. Illinois has tried mightily to deal with a system of capital punishment that had, as The Chicago Tribune described it, ―one of the worst records of wrongful capital convictions in the country.‖ The sentences of 167 condemned inmates were commuted in 2003. Four others were pardoned and a moratorium on the death penalty has been in effect since 2000. But prosecutors continue mindlessly to seek the death penalty. And the system for trying murder cases remains a mess. As The Tribune wrote in an editorial just last week: ―Lawmakers still haven‘t taken adequate steps to ensure that the death penalty is applied evenly across the state, or to guard against wrongful convictions based on errant identifications of witnesses or mistakes

at forensic labs. False confessions and prosecutorial missteps are still alarmingly common.‖ In the paper‘s view, ―Illinois must abolish the death penalty.‖ And so must the United States.

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STUPID TIMES, AND A TOUGH TURKEY DAY

When a hero isn't hero enough, you know it's a hard year for giving thanks.

By Nick Coleman, Star Tribune-November 20, 2010

Thanksgiving Day is Thursday, and it may be a challenge for a lot of Americans to find a bit of gratitude along with the turkey gravy this year:

We live in stupid times.

Last week, a soldier from Iowa named Salvatore Giunta was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for risking his life under enemy fire to save wounded comrades in Afghanistan. Most Americans shared Barack Obama's open admiration for Giunta ("I really like this guy," Obama said during the ceremony, departing from the script). But in America, in 2010, no conversation seems complete without the nuttiest viewpoints being included.

So a guy named Bryan Fischer from a conservative group called the American Family Association denounced Giunta's award, saying the Medal of Honor had become "sissified" by being presented for

saving lives, not for taking them. "When are we going to start awarding the Medal of Honor once again for soldiers who kill people and break things so our families can sleep safely at night," he asked.

I would like to point out that Staff Sgt. Giunta was not just strolling through Afghanistan looking for a cup of tea at the time he acted like a sissy and dragged his friends to safety under a hail of bullets. But it's people like Bryan Fischer who have helped us be wary of a Muslim president who was born in Kenya and has jammed through death panels to make us pull the plug on Grandpa and has bankrupted our children by bailing out the tycoons during the Bush administration and wants our soldiers to bring ice cold lemonade to Al-Qaida all the while forcing us to listen to Nazi propaganda on National Public Radio while we should be out there buying gold and subscribing to Glenn Beck's food insurance against the coming inflation/famine.

Wait: That next to last chestnut about the Nazis at NPR came from an actual smart person, Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News, who -- this is a case of the kettle calling the jackboots black -- said public radio only permits one point of view, Der Führer's view. Which certainly seems unfair, since I thought only Bill O'Reilly is permitted to broadcast from the Reichstag. The reason to remember Ailes here is to remind ourselves that the stupidity serves a purpose: An ongoing campaign to make Obama into a Socialist, Democrats into Communists, and any competing outlets of news, information and culture into the enemy -- even if it's a really old enemy that hasn't been around since the days when men only won medals for killing.

So, yes, there's going to be some tough turkey on Thursday, and not just for liberals. The economy is a wreck, unemployment is stuck at double-digits, Washington is still in head-in-the-sand mode (Congress failed to extend unemployment benefits last week) and if you want to get on an airplane and go someplace to forget our troubles, you're likely to get your private parts squeezed hard by the tough, new People Squeezers of the TSA. And they won't even say, "Thank you."

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I will not even bother to talk today about the rump group of Minnesota Republicans who are waging a never-ending campaign to turn back the clock and elect Tom Emmer governor just as if those extra 8,755 votes Mark Dayton got never existed. Maybe they can get a DeLorean, a flux capacitor and Marty McFly back together to see if they can go back in time to keep Dayton's parents from meeting back in 1945.

So, no, I don't see a lot to be thankful for this Thanksgiving. Except for the important stuff: Family, friends, the bounty of the harvest, the gifts of God -- however you understand him, or her -- and our ability, despite everything, to hold onto hope.

"To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic," said Howard Zinn, the historian, activist, author of "A People's History of the United States" and World War II bombardier, who died last winter. "It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness...

"If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something... If we remember the time and places...where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction...To live now, as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory."

No, it's not the worst of times. And it certainly is not the best of times. But gratitude and thankfulness keep hope alive. So here's a Thanksgiving toast, for those of like mind, or those who see things differently: Happy Thanksgiving.

And thank you, Lord, for men, and women, like Staff Sgt. Salvatore Giunta.

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Message to the Tea Party -- What took you so long to get angry?

You didn't get mad when the Supreme Court stopped a legal recount and

appointed a President.

You didn't get mad when Cheney allowed Energy company officials to

dictate Energy policy and push us to invade Iraq .

You didn't get mad when a covert CIA operative got outed.

You didn't get mad when the Patriot Act got passed.

You didn't get mad when we illegally invaded a country that posed no threat to us.

You didn't get mad when we spent over 800 billion (and counting) on said illegal war.

You didn't get mad when Bush borrowed more money from foreign sources than the previous 42

Presidents combined.

You didn't get mad when over 10 billion dollars in cash just disappeared in Iraq .

You didn't get mad when you found out we were torturing people.

You didn't get mad when Bush embraced trade and outsourcing policies

that shipped 6 million American jobs out of the country.

You didn't get mad when the government was illegally wiretapping Americans.

You didn't get mad when we didn't catch Bin Laden.

You didn't get mad when Bush rang up 10 trillion dollars in combined budget and current account

deficits.

You didn't get mad when you saw the horrible conditions at Walter Reed.

You didn't get mad when we let a major US city, New Orleans , drown.

You didn't get mad when we gave people who had more money than they could spend, the filthy

rich, over a trillion dollars in taxbreaks.

You didn't get mad with the worst 8 years of job creations in several decades.

You didn't get mad when over 200,000 US citizens lost their lives because they had no health

insurance.

You didn't get mad when lack of oversight and regulations from the Bush Administration caused

US citizens to lose 12 trillion dollars in investments, retirement, and home values.

No . . . You finally got mad when a black man was elected President and decided that people in

America deserved the right to see a doctor if they are sick.

Illegal wars, lies, corruption, torture, job losses by the millions, stealing your tax dollars to make

the rich richer, and the worst economic disaster since 1929 are all okay with you, but helping

fellow Americans who are sick . . . Oh, Hell No!!

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ONCE AGAIN, CONSERVATIVES TWIST THE TRUTH By Myles Spicer –Star Tribune-January 15, 2011 Asking reasonable questions hardly exploits the Tucson tragedy. The perverse attempt of conservatives to somehow blame liberals and Democrats for the events that happened in Tucson is bizarre. They have done this sort of thing before, but this time they should not be allowed to get away with it. The day after the shooting, Rush Limbaugh stated that the Democrats were using the event "to further their agenda." John Kyl, a Republican Arizona senator, blasted Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, a Democrat, for "inappropriate comments," even though they were relevant to the situation. Most blatant of all was conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg, who synthesized the conservative strategy with a column in the Los Angeles Times headed "The exploitive rhetoric of tragedy." Goldberg somehow charged that "proud liberals are fueling mass panic over our 'political discourse.'" Like most conservatives, he is following the simple strategy that "a good defense is a strong offense." Offensive indeed. There is no evidence that liberals are attempting to "exploit" this tragedy. Do they want the American public to revisit the rhetoric in our country? Yes. Do they want us to reevaluate our gun laws? Yes. Do they want certain language dialed back in our political discourse? Yes again. But to call that "exploitive" is disingenuous. Conservatives attempt to frame the Tucson shooting as the act of a deranged person -- often with analogies to Columbine. But it is much more than that, based strictly on the facts. It is a political assassination, pure and simple. Such an act can be both the work of a deranged mind and a political agenda. Goldberg points out that Loughner had "fixated on [Rep. Gabrielle] Giffords since 2007" -- and so he had. But he did not act on his fixation until now. Now -- after two years during which the political climate has greatly changed. After Tea Party aficionados went screaming, some with guns, to Town Hall meetings with members of Congress. After Rep. Joe Wilson yelled to President Obama "You lie!" during the State of the Union address.

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After birthers persistently claimed that our president was illegitimately elected. After even the most responsible Republicans have been intimidated from tamping down the rhetoric. No liberals I know of have exploited this act, or have called for a closing down of free speech. Political discourse in our country has always been vigorous. When one of Lincoln's opponents called him "a two-faced liar" Lincoln responded: "If I were two-faced, do you think I would be wearing this one?" No, it is less our elected politicians who have fueled this increase in heated rhetoric than two other groups. First are those who, like Sarah Palin, are politically involved but who are not overtly running for office, and thus have little to lose by going over the top in their pronouncements. In her recent video, Palin runs from any responsibility and blames everyone but herself. It has been noted that Palin has taken the crosshairs chart off her Facebook page. To that we should ask: Why? (Because she knows it was transmitting exactly what conservatives are trying to deny.) The second group are those vitriolic radio talk-show hosts who have no compunction about making the most obscene and violent statements day after day. Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, Savage et al. spew the most outrageous lies and unfounded charges day after day until many of their falsehoods are actually believed. This is a major component in the incendiary rhetoric we hear today. Goldberg and others absurdly emphasize Loughner's reading "Mein Kampf" or "The Communist Manifesto." Nice try -- but did Loughner listen to Limbaugh, Beck, Savage, Palin, Mark Levin, Laura Ingraham, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, and on and on? That is the more relevant question. This technique has been employed after virtually every assassination of opponents of the right -- most recently after Dr. George Tiller was killed and the right deflected criticism by somehow blaming liberals. This time, Goldberg, Kyl, Limbaugh and other conservatives should not be allowed to inaccurately manufacture the liberal/Democratic position, because their parody of it is patently false. What responsible liberals want from this is very simple. Dial back hot talk that inflames our political process and revisit our gun laws to see if we can both protect the Second Amendment and the safety of our citizens. No one has suggested muzzling free speech, nor has there been any evidence of liberals creating "mass panic" over our political discourse.The charge is a transparent political strategy. Myles Spicer is a retired ad agency owner in Minnetonka.

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An Assassination’s Long Shadow

By ADAM HOCHSCHILD- OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR-NEW YORK TIMES-JANUARY 17, 2011

TODAY, millions of people on another

continent are observing the 50th

anniversary of an event few Americans

remember, the assassination of Patrice

Lumumba. A slight, goateed man with

black, half-framed glasses, the 35-year-

old Lumumba was the first

democratically chosen leader of the vast

country, nearly as large as the United

States east of the Mississippi, now

known as the Democratic Republic of

Congo.

This treasure house of natural resources

had been a colony of Belgium, which for decades had made no plans for independence. But

after clashes with Congolese nationalists, the Belgians hastily arranged the first national

election in 1960, and in June of that year King Baudouin arrived to formally give the

territory its freedom.

“It is now up to you, gentlemen,” he arrogantly told Congolese dignitaries, “to show that you

are worthy of our confidence.”

The Belgians, and their European and American fellow investors, expected to continue

collecting profits from Congo’s factories, plantations and lucrative mines, which produced

diamonds, gold, uranium, copper and more. But they had not planned on Lumumba.

A dramatic, angry speech he gave in reply to Baudouin brought Congolese legislators to

their feet cheering, left the king startled and frowning and caught the world’s attention.

Lumumba spoke forcefully of the violence and humiliations of colonialism, from the

ruthless theft of African land to the way that French-speaking colonists talked to Africans as

adults do to children, using the familiar “tu” instead of the formal “vous.” Political

independence was not enough, he said; Africans had to also benefit from the great wealth in

their soil.

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With no experience of self-rule and an empty treasury, his huge country was soon in

turmoil. After failing to get aid from the United States, Lumumba declared he would turn to

the Soviet Union. Thousands of Belgian officials who lingered on did their best to sabotage

things: their code word for Lumumba in military radio transmissions was “Satan.” Shortly

after he took office as prime minister, the C.I.A., with White House approval, ordered his

assassination and dispatched an undercover agent with poison.

The would-be poisoners could not get close enough to Lumumba to do the job, so instead

the United States and Belgium covertly funneled cash and aid to rival politicians who seized

power and arrested the prime minister. Fearful of revolt by Lumumba’s supporters if he

died in their hands, the new Congolese leaders ordered him flown to the copper-rich

Katanga region in the country’s south, whose secession Belgium had just helped orchestrate.

There, on Jan. 17, 1961, after being beaten and tortured, he was shot. It was a chilling

moment that set off street demonstrations in many countries.

As a college student traveling through Africa on summer break, I was in Léopoldville

(today’s Kinshasa), Congo’s capital, for a few days some six months after Lumumba’s

murder. There was an air of tension and gloom in the city, jeeps full of soldiers were on

patrol, and the streets quickly emptied at night. Above all, I remember the triumphant,

macho satisfaction with which two young American Embassy officials — much later

identified as C.I.A. men — talked with me over drinks about the death of someone they

regarded not as an elected leader but as an upstart enemy of the United States.

Some weeks before his death, Lumumba had briefly escaped from house arrest and, with a

small group of supporters, tried to flee to the eastern Congo, where a counter-government of

his sympathizers had formed. The travelers had to traverse the Sankuru River, after which

friendly territory began. Lumumba and several companions crossed the river in a dugout

canoe to commandeer a ferry to go back and fetch the rest of the group, including his wife

and son.

But by the time they returned to the other bank, government troops pursuing them had

arrived. According to one survivor, Lumumba’s famous eloquence almost persuaded the

soldiers to let them go. Events like this are often burnished in retrospect, but however the

encounter happened, Lumumba seems to have risked his life to try to rescue the others, and

the episode has found its way into film and fiction.

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THE SPLENDOR OF CITIES By David Brooks-New York Times-February 7, 2011 Chicago The people who run the federal government spend almost no time outdoors. They get driven from home to work and move through corridors from meeting to meeting. So it was a little odd after all those times interviewing Rahm Emanuel when he was the White House chief of staff to be chasing him, outside, down

an icy Chicago street. He was underdressed for the weather, as all politicians feel compelled to be, in a leather jacket and jeans, and he was knocking on doors as part of a campaign for mayor. Emanuel was a colorful figure in Washington, but back home he‘s off the leash.

He‘s clearly a much happier person — glowing, bouncing, reminiscing and hugging. Gone are all the death-grip battles with Republicans and the Washington interest groups. Now startled people in sweatpants greet him when he shows up at their doorway, sometimes wrapping him in an embrace and sometimes bringing their kids out to pose for pictures. Nearly every single person he meets gets an ebullient high-five, though the cause for each celebration is not always clear. I was struck by how many voters wanted to talk to him about education. Chicagoans have clearly internalized the fact that their city can‘t prosper so long as so many public school students are dropping out. So Emanuel rips through his school reform agenda, which is like Obama‘s national agenda, except on steroids. He‘s got a Chicago version of the Race to the Top in which schools that reform the fastest get a pot of money. He‘s for school performance contracts in which school leaders vow to meet certain goals or risk losing control of their schools. He‘s for sending school report cards out to parents so they can measure how well their own schools are performing.

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As people come and talk to him, everything has a marvelous concreteness. In Washington, it‘s sometimes hard to connect the abstract laws that are being passed to the actual effects on neighborhoods or families. But in a mayoral race, people talk about this specific playground or that recycling center or the police precinct over there. Many of us are drawn to the big power politics of Washington, but city politics is better than national politics because the problems are more tangible and the communication is more face to face. This is a point Edward Glaeser fleshes out in his terrific new book, ―Triumph of the City.‖ Glaeser points out that far from withering in the age of instant global information flows, cities have only become more important. That‘s because humans communicate best when they are physically brought together. Two University of Michigan researchers brought groups of people together face to face and asked them to play a difficult cooperation game. Then they organized other groups and had them communicate electronically. The face-to-face groups thrived. The electronic groups fractured and struggled. Cities magnify people‘s strengths, Glaeser argues, because ideas spread more easily in dense environments. If you want to compete in a global marketplace it really helps to be near a downtown. Companies that are near the geographic center of their industry are more productive. Year by year, workers in cities see their wages grow faster than workers outside of cities because their skills grow faster. Inventors disproportionately cite ideas from others who live physically close to them. For years, cities like Detroit built fancy towers and development projects in the hopes that this would revive the downtown core. But cities thrive because they host quality conversations, not because they have new buildings and convention centers. The cities that have thrived over the past few decades tend to have high median temperatures in January (people like warm winters and other amenities). But even cold cities like Chicago can thrive if they attract college grads. As the number of college graduates in a metropolitan area increases by 10 percent, individuals‘ earnings increase by 7.7. This applies even to the high school grads in the city because their productivity rises, too. When you clump together different sorts of skilled people and force them to rub against one another, they create friction and instability, which leads to tension and creativity, which leads to small business growth. As Glaeser notes, cities that rely on big businesses wither. Those that incubate small ones grow. Recently, Emanuel visited Valois: See Your Food, a South Side institution that gives new meaning to the phrase ―greasy spoon.‖ As he made his way from table to table — from cops to middle-class families, graduate students, the unemployed and single moms — he fell into a dozen intense and divergent conversations. Chicago has its problems: it suffers under one of the biggest debt loads in the country. But it has thrived because it has had good leadership, a constantly updated housing stock, a good business environment and an ethos that attracts talent and celebrates blunt conversation.

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THE NEXT STEP FOR EGYPT’S OPPOSITION By Mohamed ElBaradei-New York Times-February 10, 2011

When I was a young man in Cairo, we voiced our political views in whispers, if at all, and only to friends we could trust. We lived in an atmosphere of fear and repression. As far back as I can remember, I felt outrage as I witnessed the misery of Egyptians struggling to put food on the table, keep a roof over their heads and get medical care. I saw firsthand how poverty and repression can destroy values and crush dignity, self-worth and hope. Half a century later, the freedoms of the Egyptian people remain largely denied. Egypt, the land of the Library of Alexandria, of a culture that contributed groundbreaking advances in mathematics, medicine and science, has fallen far behind. More than 40 percent of our people live on less than $2 per day. Nearly 30 percent are illiterate, and Egypt is on the list of failed states. Under the three decades of Hosni Mubarak‘s rule, Egyptian society has lived under a draconian ―emergency law‖ that strips people of their most basic rights, including freedom of association and of assembly, and has imprisoned tens of thousands of political dissidents. While this Orwellian regime has been valued by some of Egypt‘s Western allies as ―stable,‖ providing, among other assets, a convenient location for rendition, it has been in reality a ticking bomb and a vehicle for radicalism. But one aspect of Egyptian society has changed in recent years. Young Egyptians, gazing through the windows of the Internet, have gained a keener sense than many of their elders of the freedoms and opportunities they lack. They have found in social media a way to interact and share ideas, bypassing, in virtual space, the restrictions placed on physical freedom of assembly. The world has witnessed their courage and determination in recent weeks, but democracy is not a cause that first occurred to them on Jan. 25. Propelled by a passionate belief in democratic ideals and the yearning for a better future, they have long been mobilizing and laying the groundwork for change that they view as inevitable.

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The tipping point came with the Tunisian revolution, which sent a powerful psychological message: ―Yes, we can.‖ These young leaders are the future of Egypt. They are too intelligent, too aware of what is at stake, too weary of promises long unfulfilled, to settle for anything less than the departure of the old regime. I am humbled by their bravery and resolve. Many, particularly in the West, have bought the Mubarak regime‘s fiction that a democratic Egypt will turn into chaos or a religious state, abrogate the fragile peace with Israel and become hostile to the West. But the people of Egypt — the grandmothers in veils who have dared to share Tahrir Square with army tanks, the jubilant young people who have risked their lives for their first taste of these new freedoms — are not so easily fooled. The United States and its allies have spent the better part of the last decade, at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars and countless lives, fighting wars to establish democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now that the youth of Cairo, armed with nothing but Facebook and the power of their convictions, have drawn millions into the street to demand a true Egyptian democracy, it would be absurd to continue to tacitly endorse the rule of a regime that has lost its own people‘s trust. Egypt will not wait forever on this caricature of a leader we witnessed on television yesterday evening, deaf to the voice of the people, hanging on obsessively to power that is no longer his to keep. What needs to happen instead is a peaceful and orderly transition of power, to channel the revolutionary fervor into concrete steps for a new Egypt based on freedom and social justice. The new leaders will have to guarantee the rights of all Egyptians. They will need to dissolve the current Parliament, no longer remotely representative of the people. They will also need to abolish the Constitution, which has become an instrument of repression, and replace it with a provisional Constitution, a three-person presidential council and a transitional government of national unity. The presidential council should include a representative of the military, embodying the sharing of power needed to ensure continuity and stability during this critical transition. The job of the presidential council and the interim government during this period should be to set in motion the process that will turn Egypt into a free and democratic society. This includes drafting a democratic Constitution to be put to a referendum, and preparing for free and fair presidential and parliamentary elections within one year. We are at the dawn of a new Egypt. A free and democratic society, at peace with itself and with its neighbors, will be a bulwark of stability in the Middle East and a worthy partner in the international community. The rebirth of Egypt represents the hope of a new era in which Arab society, Muslim culture and the Middle East are no longer viewed through the lens of war and radicalism, but as contributors to the forward march of humanity, modernized by advanced science and technology, enriched by our diversity of art and culture and united by shared universal values. We have nothing to fear but the shadow of a repressive past.