A very dangerous Q&A

...and Sheridan you were of course wrong!

♪♫ The Victorian English Gentlemens Club - A Conversation

Punk-rock dads in suburbia: reflections on 'The Other F Word'

Bin Laden raid: ISI officials brief Abbottabad commission on US raid

Gen. Allen Disavows 2014: US Going to Stay in Afghanistan ‘For a Long Time’

Fresh off of CBS releasing a new poll showing overwhelming American opposition to continuing the war in Afghanistan US General John Allen, the new commander of the occupation, rejected the prospect of the war ending any time soon.

Indeed, in an interview with CBS’ 60 Minutes, Gen. Allen disavowed the 2014 Lisbon Conference date for ending the war, saying “we’re actually going to be here for a long time” and that the troop levels beyond 2014 were yet to be decided.
Allen, who replaced Gen. Petraeus as commander of the Afghan War and became the fourth commander since President Obama took office in 2009, did not offer the usual collection of “foolproof” strategy changes designed to turn the tides in the endless conflict.
“The plan is to win,” was all Allen would offer. This either speaks to a lack of confidence in the latest strategy shift, or perhaps more likely a lack of any strategy whatsoever as the war has a momentum of its own and, with the war planned to extend through 2024, the general likely realizes there will be a dozen or more commanders that will come after him and that what he does won’t matter all that much.
Jason Ditz @'Anti War.com'

Stevie Wonder Live at Rock in Rio 2011

01 – How sweet is to be loved by you
02 – My eyes don’t cry
03 – Master blaster
04 – The way you make me feel
05 – Higher ground
06 – Living for the city
07 – Don’t you worry about a thing
08 – When I fall in love
09 – Ribbon in the sky
10 – Overjoyed
11 – Signed, sealed, delivered
12 – Sir Duke
13 – I wish
14 – Do I do
15 – For once in my life
16 – My cherie amour
17 – I just called to say I love you
18 – Check on your love
19 – Superstition / Isn’t she lovely / Fever
20 – As
Download

tom_watson tom_watson

When I tweeted about News international hiring staff for the Sun in Sunday last week, the company dismissed it: ind.pn/oigm0F

When Were We Winning In Afghanistan?

??? (Speaking as someone who doesn't have a TV)

ISAFmedia ISAF

Half of Afgans have TV, compared with nearly none in 2001. 75 TV and 175 radio stations beaming info to AFG people

Got TV - oh that's a good step then...I hope they have better programmes than out here!

Australian Copyright Meeting was ‘Off the Record’

What damage does alcohol do to our bodies?

We know that drinking too much alcohol is bad for us. It gives us hangovers, makes us feel tired and does little for our appearance - and that is just the morning afterwards.

Long term, it increases the risk of developing a long list of health conditions including breast cancer, oral cancers, heart disease, strokes and cirrhosis of the liver.
Research shows that a high alcohol intake can also damage our mental health, impair memory skills and reduce fertility.
The direct link between alcohol and the liver is well understood - but what about the impact of alcohol on other organs?
Numerous heart studies suggest that moderate alcohol consumption helps protect against heart disease by raising good cholesterol and stopping the formation of blood clots in the arteries.
Toxic
However, drinking more than three drinks a day has been found to have a direct and damaging effect on the heart. Heavy drinking, particularly over time, can lead to high blood pressure, alcoholic cardiomyopathy, congestive heart failure and stroke. Heavy drinking also puts more fat into the circulation of the body.
The link between alcohol and cancer is well established, says Cancer Research UK. A study published in the BMJ this year estimated that alcohol consumption causes at least 13,000 cancer cases in the UK each year - about 9,000 cases in men and 4,000 in women.
Cancer experts say that for every additional 10g per day of alcohol drunk, the risk of breast cancer increases by approximately 7-12%.
For bowel cancer, previous studies show that increasing alcohol intake by 100g per week increases the cancer risk by 19%.
A recent report in BioMed Central's Immunology journal found that alcohol impairs the body's ability to fight off viral infections.
And studies on fertility suggest that even light drinking can make women less likely to conceive while heavy drinking in men can lower sperm quality and quantity.
Why alcohol has this negative effect on all elements of our health could be down to acetaldehyde - the product alcohol is broken down into in the body.
Acetaldehyde is toxic and has been shown to damage DNA.
Dr KJ Patel, from the Medical Research Council's laboratory of molecular biology in Cambridge, recently completed a study into the toxic effects of alcohol on mice.
His research implies that a single binge-drinking dose of alcohol during pregnancy may be sufficient to cause permanent damage to a baby's genome.
Foetal alcohol syndrome, he says, "can give rise to children who are seriously damaged, born with head and facial abnormalities and mental disabilities".
'Clear dose relationship'
Alcohol is a well-established cancer causing agent, he says.
"You cannot get a cancer cell occurring unless DNA is altered. When you drink, the acetaldehyde is corrupting the DNA of life and puts you on the road to cancer.
"One of most common genetic defects in man is our inability to counteract the toxicity of alcohol."
Dr Nick Sheron, who runs the liver unit at Southampton General Hospital, says the mechanisms by which alcohol does damage are not quite so clear cut.

"The toxicity of alcohol is complex, but we do know there is a clear dose relationship."

With alcoholic liver disease, the greater the alcohol intake per week the greater the liver damage and that increases exponentially for someone drinking six to eight bottles or more of wine in that period, for example.
Over the past 20 to 30 years, Dr Sheron says, deaths from liver disease have increased by 500%, with 85% of those due to alcohol. Only in the last few years has that rise slowed down.
"Alcohol has a bigger impact than smoking on our health because alcohol kills at a younger age. The average age of death for someone with alcoholic liver disease is their 40s."
'More harmful than heroin or crack'
Alcohol is undoubtedly a public health issue too.
Earlier this year, NHS figures showed that alcohol-related hospital admissions has reached record levels in 2010. Over a million people were admitted in 2009-10, compared with 945,500 in 2008-09 and 510,800 in 2002-03. Nearly two in three of those cases were men.
At the same time the charity Alcohol Concern predicted the number of admissions would reach 1.5m a year by 2015 and cost the NHS £3.7bn a year.
Last year, a study in The Lancet concluded that alcohol is more harmful than heroin or crack when the overall dangers to the individual and society are considered.
The study by the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs also ranked alcohol as three times more harmful than cocaine or tobacco because it is so widely used.
So how much alcohol is too much? What can we safely drink?
The government guidelines on drinking are being reviewed at present. They currently say that a women should not drink more than two to three units of alcohol per day and a man three to four units a day.
But Paul Wallace, a GP and chief medical adviser of Drinkaware, says people are just not aware of the alcohol content of a large glass of wine.
"Most of us don't realise what we're drinking and you can very easily slip beyond acceptable limits."
Katherine Brown, head of research at the Institute of Alcohol Studies, says the current guidelines and how they are communicated may be giving the public misleading information.
"We need to be very careful when suggesting there is a 'safe' level of drinking for the population. Rather, we need to explain that there are risks associated with alcohol consumption, and that the less you drink the lower your risk is of developing health problems.
"We hope the government use this as an opportunity to help change perceptions about regular drinking being a normal, risk-free practice."
Dr Wallace wants the government to do a better job on the message it sends out by explaining the alcohol guidelines in units per week, rather than per day - no more than 21 units for men, 14 units for women per week.
Dr Sheron agrees: "There is no such thing as a safe level, but the government has got to draw a line somewhere. It's a balance.
"People like having a drink, but they have to accept there's a risk-benefit ratio."
Phillipa Roxby @'BBC'

An Addiction Vaccine, Tantalizingly Close

Hmmm! Not sure that I agree with the idea of an addiction vaccine, and I speak here as an addict myself.
I do remember having a conversation with my eldest son when I first came across this many years ago and even tho he was in his early teens at the time when I asked him, as the child of addicts would he have wanted this vaccine and he said 'no'.
Remember free-will?

At NYC's Chelsea Hotel, The End Of An Artistic Era?

The fabled Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan was home to Mark Twain, Virgil Thomson and Brendan Behan. Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey, there. Jack Kerouac worked on On the Road. Bob Dylan wrote "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands." Artists Larry Rivers and Mark Rothko, and scores of painters and photographers also spent creative time there. But now the future of the hotel is up in the air.
Multimedia and performance artist Nicola L. has been at the Chelsea some 30 years. She came, she returned to France, she rented another New York apartment, and then she returned. "You come back to Chelsea like you go to your mother when something is wrong," she says.
But the building has been sold. Once filled with art by residents, the walls and stairwells are mostly bare now. Only the long-term residents remain. The staff — some of whom had been there for decades — have been let go. When the staff left, says Nicola L., "the bellman, the people at the desk — it was like we didn't have family anymore and we were in an empty boat. "
The Chelsea Hotel is unlike any other in New York. It's split between rental apartments, and tiny hotel rooms where people could stay for a night. Ed Hamilton, author of Legends of the Chelsea Hotel, has lived there for 16 years. The first apartment he had cost him $500 a month.
"It must have been 100 square feet," he says. Now he lives with his wife in a room that's twice that size but seems minuscule: no kitchen, the bathroom is down the hall, clothes are hanging on the walls.
"I came here to be a writer because it seemed like the place to go," he says. "I was in my mid-30s. We had always heard about this place because Thomas Wolfe had lived here, and the beat writers."
The hotel is filled with ghosts. Not only those of Dylan Thomas, who drank himself to death at the Chelsea, or Nancy Spungen, the girlfriend of Sid Vicious, who was stabbed to death in their room, but all kinds of ghosts. Sherill Tippins has spent six years writing a book on the Chelsea. She once brought a friend to the hotel who claimed she could see ghosts.
The friend was up all night, talking to the ghosts, Tippins reports. "She told me, 'They're everywhere — in the elevators and in the lobby, and they want attention so much.' " Larry Rivers, the "leading ghost," told the friend: "It is not about the art, it is about the life. That is the important thing here..."