Maybe it's time to start being kinder to ourselves

Probably originating in 12-Step groups, I have heard plenty of admonitions, chidings and warnings in various locales in life about "pity pots" and "pity parties."

But, some new psychological research says that maybe we need to stop worrying so much about "pity parties" and instead have more concern about how kind we are to ourselves.

A LOT more concern, including learning it as a top-level life skill.

This is NOT the "give every kid an A to boost self esteem," the study makes clear. In fact, it notes that that technique often backfires, and can lead to neuroticism, emotional fragility and narcissism.

"It is not this nimby, bimby stuff," said Paul Gilbert, a researcher at Kingsway Hospital in the United Kingdom. "Compassion is sensitivity to the suffering of self and others and a commitment to do something about it."

Kristin Neff, an associate professor of psychology and the mother of an autistic child, writes about cultivating self-compassion from her own parenting experience as well as her professional background, in the just-published book, "Self-Compassion."

She lists three aspects to it: mindfulness, common humanity and kindness.

Mindfulness, whether done as a full meditative practice or not, is as Neff describes it, accepting emotions without either suppressing/blocking them OR fixating on/attaching to them.

Common humanity is, to riff on another old phrase from "the other folks," recognizing that our hurts and pains aren't "terminally unique" either.

And, kindness is kindness to ourselves as well as others.

The LiveScience authors go on to note that self-esteem of the type I stereotypically mentioned above still have a competitive and comparative element to it. Self-kindness does not.

And, speaking of competitiveness, other researchers, the story notes, believe that as the pace of modern Western life accelerates, self-punishment will likely increase.

But, won't being kind to ourselves a lot lead to a temptation to "let ourselves off the hook"? No, but that's been anticipated too:

(A)ccording to Neff, the most common fear about becoming self-compassionate is that it will lower performance standards and encourage laziness. But researchers have found that self-compassionate people are actually less likely to sit on the couch all day eating bonbons.

So, lighten up. Especially on yourself. And let's encourage each other on this.

Luck and life — Roger Staubach

First, an explainer.

By luck, I mean nothing other than random chance. I'm not talking about an allegedly metaphysical element.

Anyway, what prompted this?

I just got done reading a (cheap knockout) bio of Roger Staubach.

I had forgotten both the Kansas City Chiefs AND the Dallas Cowboys drafted him as a "futures" player, similar to the Boston Celtics with Larry Bird.

Cowboys took him in the 10th round, the Chiefs in the 15th of the AFL draft.

That said, late in his senior year at the Naval Academy, the Chiefs first approached him with the idea of signing a player services contract during the years he was still in the Navy.

He said he'd have to talk to Navy officials, to make sure it wasn't unethical or illegal. They said it was OK, and word got back to Dallas. Gil Brandt then offered a similar contract at better money.

Roger said he didn't want a bidding war, and, looking at the NFL as more glamorous, accepted.

OK, forward to 1969. Roger gets big break No. 1 when Don Meredith retires from the Cowboys. That's part of a luck two-parter. He could have been in Kansas City watching Len Dawson start to burnish his credentials for the Hall of Fame by leading the Chiefs to victory in Super Bowl IV Roger's rookie season.

Or, he could have been in Dallas with an nonretired Dandy Don perhaps taking Dallas into that Super Bowl as well, with a slightly more mellowed Tom Landry at the helm.

So, remember, luck plays a big, big role in life.

(And, no, no posts here telling me that God wanted Staubach where he wound up, and as a heroic starter for the Cowboys.)

Obama: Next George H.W. Bush?

I and many another pundit has pointed out the parallels between the presidencies of Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter, but Salon's Andrew Leonard suggests parallels with Bush 41, as well as suggesting the White House is thinking along the same lines, or should be.

#Kevorkian - my semi-personal connections

With the news that Jack Kevorkian, the "Dr. Death" assisted suicide proponent, is dead at 83, I offer a moment of reflection on two semi-personal connections to him.

First, in the middle 1990s, I had a year of adjunct college teaching work in Flint, Mich. The place was Baker College, which had a division called "corporate services" devoted to adult college education, primarily to UAW workers using union benefits to try to get a degree before the next round of Big Three layoffs.

Well, partly due to my divinity degree, one class I was teaching was a class on issues in death and dying - religious, philosophical, medical, legal and psychological/sociological.

And, it just so happened that Kevorkian's first trial for assisted suicide was during this time, which made for an easy class assignment.

Students were told they were a "jury," and they had to clip at least one newspaper article (hey, it was 1993!) and paste it into a diary, along with at least one journal entry per week. At either the last week of class, or the week his trial wrapped up, they'd vote, like the real jury, on his fate.

From relatively conservative Catholics on to farther "left" on the religion scale, he was unanimously acquitted.

As I was in the process of moving beyond the religious beliefs with which I had been raised, the course was interesting and challenging for me, too.

Second connection?

At around the same time, I had an interview for a job in Los Angeles.

On my plane flight west? Kevorkian's mouthpiece, Geoffrey Fieger, who had not yet hit the level of total outrageousness that he did later on, as his Wiki page documents.

Despite his ever-growing ego level since the start of the Kevorkian saga, I don't doubt Fieger will indeed shed tears.



That said, I left him be in peace on the flight; the class was done, and there was no other reason to disturb his space.

Many people still ask "why" as to Kevorkian doing it. I think part of it was genuine concern. Part of it was, though, psychological issues on his part, some of them related to his Armenian background and his feeling, already then, that the Ottoman Empire's genocide of Armenians hadn't gotten due recognition.

As for those larger issues, though? William Saletan gets it about right. Kevorkian did bring this out from the shadows, but, he was lax at truly looking at his patients' needs and the best way to help them, and he overall wasn't the best "role model" for the movement of assisted suicide rights.

But, he was raising the right questions and issues:

Assisted suicide, it turns out, is a lot like abortion. No government can stop it—I would have risked jail to get the pills if necessary—and efforts to enforce its prohibition only make it less careful and humane. But, like the right to abortion, it can be abused. People want to die for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes it's agony. Sometimes it's boredom. Sometimes it's fear. Maybe your mother needs a lethal prescription. Maybe she needs antidepressants. Maybe you just need to hold her hand.

Kevorkian didn't have the answers. But he raised the right questions. We can't criticize his flaws, temper his ideas, and praise the hospice movement without acknowledging what he did. He forced an open conversation about the right to take your own life. Under what conditions, and within what limits, should that right be exercised? Even if it's legal, is it moral? What do you do when a loved one wants to die? Kevorkian didn't take those questions with him. He has left them to us.

Eighteen years ago, the "good Catholics" and others in my death and dying class largely agreed.

(Sidebar; whenever I look at the Washington Post op-ed page, or glance at Faux News, I actually think Charles Krauthammer is "Dr. Death."

Ed Brayton does a solid half-job on American exceptionalism

Ed Brayton uses one of Sarah Palin's latest bits of nuttery to tackle American exceptionalism.

Unfortunately, he ONLY looks at right-wingers' attachment to this, rather than noting that many, many, many a "liberal" also believes that American is inherently special, often for religious reasons, just like many on the right, but sometimes for other reasons.

(And, the religious reasons don't always include orthodox Christianity, either.)

E coli outbreak would be legal in U.S.

To be specific, the E coli variant that's killed 17 Europeans and counting, would be legal here, in part because the Food and Drug Administration doesn't require produce testing and in part because we don't test for but a few strains of E coli in the foodstuffs we do taste.

But, then again, if you believe evolution doesn't exist, or you believe it's a waste of time to fund health preventativeness measures, it doesn't matter, does it?

#MichaelLind, liar on #PeakOil and #globalwarming

First, Salon columnist Michael Lind came off sounding like Daniel Yergin, or Julian Simon, Michael Shermer and other cornucopians, claiming there is no such thing as Peak Oil.

In part of the column, he also pooh-poohed the seriousness of global warming.

His colleague at Salon, Andrew Leonard, called him out for these and other issues.

And now Lind has written a non-rebuttal "rebuttal."

It's a non-rebuttal because it starts out by claiming that Leonard has called him a "global warming denialist." And, Michael you put that phrase in quotes, in the header, implying (or so I infer) that you think Leonard called you that.

He nowhere said that Lind was a "global warming denialist." The word "denialist" isn't even in Leonard's column.

So STOP LYING. Andrew Leonard never called you a global warming denialist, despite your claim in your second column.

I never thought I'd see Lind stoop this low.

Neocolonialism, Asian-style

South Korea, China, India, et al, are buying up more and more Egyptian farmland on the banks of the Nile River. Where will Egyptians, who rioted about bread prices three years ago, get their own food? Will they have yet another revolution against the hypercapitalists in their own country who sold this land? Will they attack the Chinese, Indian and South Korean overlords, or their local viceroys?

None of this can be good for the future stability of North Africa and the Middle East.

Rick Perry trips himself up on Prez "non-run" run

I've blogged before about the lies and myths that are the reality of the "Texas miracle" of economics. Those include, besides the new fees that aren't "taxes," the recession, including the housing problems part of it, hitting Texas later than elsewhere, as it now seems Dallas and other Texas big cities still have a year or so of housing value slide left to face.

(T)he damage is now spreading to areas that had long escaped the worst of the crisis. They include Dallas, Denver, Minneapolis and Cleveland. Economists regard them as housing bellwethers — metro areas that are reliable indicators of where national prices are headed.

Denver and Dallas are on pace to hit post-housing bust lows in the next few months.

That said, Tricky Ricky has always fallen back on the "lean, mean efficiency" of Texas state government, lead his "his truly," although he modestly doesn't say that.

Maybe there's a good reason for that modesty.

All Perry had to do was pull, oh, $2 billion out of the $9.4 billion in the state's Rainy Day Fund and spend it on education. But, nooooo, he had to play hardball.

And now, his hardball (not to mention, possibly, his hypocrisy, are coming back to bite him.

Gov. Rick Perry often cites the state budget as the only thing Texas lawmakers have to do. And, when asked before the legislative session what the state's top spending priorities should be, he named education.

But when the GOP-led Legislature adjourned the 140-day session on Monday, it did so without a budget for Texas classrooms, an omission that prompted Perry to call lawmakers back for an immediate special session to try again.

Looks like education was actually about ... uh ... 9.4 billion spots below being his top priority.

That said, maybe this is proof he's not thinking about running for president.

A supermajority in the House, a lt. gov. who failed, though he had done it before, to use parliamentary tricks in the Senate, and "poof," it's special session time.

That said, even though I'll be voting again, for political theater, I'd love to see a Perry-vs-Obama steel cage death match.

Texas: Millions to fight 1st Amdt, not one more cent for schools

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, sometimes good (especially on open records issues) and sometimes as bad a grandstander as Gov. Rick Perry, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst or U.S. Senator John Cornyn, has chosen to be a grandstander, again, over school prayer.

This time, he's spending Texas taxpayer dollars to fight a federal court order barring school-sanctioned prayer at a public high school graduation. Federal court rulings and their history on this issue are pretty clear, yet Abbott continues to waste money.

Meanwhile, Perry, Dewhurst and the GOP-dominated Texas Legislature still refuse to tap the state's $9.4 billion Rainy Day Fund surplus to provide more money for public schools.

Of course, more money for schools might have more educated students questioning such nuttery in the future.

Of course, we now have the hypocrisy trifecta, courtesy of Gov. Helmethair himself, who appears to have had his "I'm not quite yet running for president" dance get tripped up by a special session of the Legislature:

Gov. Rick Perry often cites the state budget as the only thing Texas lawmakers have to do. And, when asked before the legislative session what the state's top spending priorities should be, he named education.

Looks like education was actually about ... uh ... 9.4 billion spots below being his top priority.

The AP keeps slipping

Really, AP? Using a photo from AOL serf labor site Patch.com for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's controversial helicopter flight to his son's ballgame?

Really?