alkieanon's blog

http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cnn.heroes/index.html

Pushpa Basnet:
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cnn.heroes/2012.heroes/pushpa.basnet.html

Wanda Butts:
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cnn.heroes/2012.heroes/wanda.butts.html

Welcome To Recovery Month: September is Recovery Month Recovery Month promotes the societal benefits of prevention, treatment, and recovery for mental and substance use disorders, celebrates people in recovery, lauds the contributions of treatment and service providers, and promotes the message that recovery in all its forms is possible. Recovery Month spreads the positive message that behavioral health is essential to overall health, that prevention works, treatment is effective and people can and do recover.

I am an orange traffic cone, living the NASCAR dream one race at a time. 35,912 tweets, 1,514 following, 21,411 followers. @TheOrangeCone

http://twitter.com/TheOrangeCone

Facts About Pigeons; From war hero to the Olympics pigeons have a vast history. Today pigeons are the bottom dwellers in our cities, yet throughout history, these birds were a main source of communication. Check out these surprising facts about pigeons.

http://news.yahoo.com/who-knew/facts-about-pigeons-from-war-hero-to-the-olympics-pigeons-have-a-vast-history-30124832.html

Psychopaths can be spotted on Twitter, study says: Social media can reveal much about an individual’s personality but now researchers believe they may be able to spot psychopaths on Twitter. By analyzing speech patterns, researchers at Florida Atlantic University were able to hone in on the “Dark Triad” of psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism and were able to predict with a "reasonably high degree of accuracy" if a Twitter user was a possible psychopath.

Breathalyzer tests compulsory on all vehicles in France: All vehicles travelling on French roads must carry a chemical or electronic breathalyzer test beginning Sunday, under new rules aimed at reducing alcohol-driven accidents. "Alcohol has been the main cause of mortality on roads since 2006," according to road security authorities. About a third of fatalities on French roads is due to drink driving, a rate that far surpasses the 17 percent recorded in Britain or 10 percent in Germany.

88 ‘Books That Shaped America’. Library of Congress issues list that reflects a restless, diverse nation. Most great book lists concentrate on works of the highest literary or scholarly merit. Think of the Harvard Classics, Harold Bloom’s “Western Canon,” the Modern Library’s selection of “the 100 best novels of the 20th century.” Here, the compilers imply, are our cultural masterpieces, the Mount Everests and K2s all literate people should scale in their lifetime. You haven’t read Immanuel Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” or James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake”?

Meetings: Where work goes to die. How many meetings did you have today? This week? This month? Now ask yourself how many of those meetings were worthwhile, versus the work that you could have accomplished in that same time. This might lead one to wonder why we even have meetings at all.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/02/meetings-where-work-goes-to-die...

The importance of belonging. You are not alone. You belong. And it gets better. These are a few of a handful of powerful messages that an elegantly designed "belonging intervention" by social psychologist and Stanford assistant professor Gregory Walton conveys to study participants who are going through a difficult period.

Long a lightning rod for conservative criticism, the Girl Scouts of the USA are now facing their highest-level challenge yet: An official inquiry by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. At issue are concerns about program materials that some Catholics find offensive, as well as assertions that the Scouts associate with other groups espousing stances that conflict with church teaching. The Scouts, who have numerous parish-sponsored troops, deny many of the claims and defend their alliances.

Page not found:
http://www.orange-papers.org/forum/node/1245
There were 118, now there's one more.

Slacktivists: Changing the world with 'likes,' clicks and tweets? They fill your inbox with viral videos, re-tweet the latest cause célèbre and preach to the digital masses on their Facebook status – but do so-called “slacktivists” actually accomplish anything? "A slacktivist is someone unwilling to actually leave their computer to further the cause, so while they support the idea, they'll do the lowest common denominator to support it," Jason Stern, a New York-based Internet lawyer, told FoxNews.com. Yet other observers say "slacktivism" can yield real results.

1 of 5 Americans Shun the Internet. Next time you're standing in line at the movies, look around. Chances are there's at least one person who doesn't use the Internet.

Nasty comments toward Ann Romney cast light on haters who can't handle feminine role. Top Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen provided a clear psychological window on women who despise other women when she showed gut-level contempt for Ann Romney -- describing her as "never having worked a day in her life." Anyone who thrives in an American company or American home, while proud and happy with any element of traditional American values, must be a hopeless automaton or relic of the oppressive past.

In a move that threatens to further inflame concerns about the rationing of medical care, the nation's leading association of cancer physicians issued a list on Wednesday of five common tests and treatments that doctors should stop offering to cancer patients.

The list emerged from a two-year effort, similar to a project other medical specialties are undertaking, to identify procedures that do not help patients live longer or better or that may even be harmful, yet are routinely prescribed.

Not exactly AA related, but close enough: "... “the fantasy cycle”. It is a pattern that recurs in personal lives, in politics, in history – and in storytelling. When we embark on a course of action which is unconsciously driven by wishful thinking, all may seem to go well for a time, in what may be called the “dream stage”. But because this make-believe can never be reconciled with reality, it leads to a “frustration stage” as things start to go wrong, prompting a more determined effort to keep the fantasy in being.

"When Bob Krause turned 90 last week, it was by virtue of an unflagging determination and a mentality of precision that kept his body humming after being diagnosed with diabetes as a boy.

A leading diabetes research center named the San Diego resident the first American known to live 85 years with the disease, a life that has paralleled – and benefited from – the evolution in treatment."

Is Free Will an Illusion? Scientists, Philosophers Forced to Differ
http://www.livescience.com/19213-free-fate.html

"Are you really in control, or is your every decision predetermined? Who's at the steering wheel: you, your genes, your upbringing, fate, karma, God?

Someone posed the question "I don't know why the steppers choose to read and comment on this site ..."

Guess the short answer is "counter speech".
http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/22/opinion/wolf-rutgers-internet-privacy/inde...

"Speak up: Clicking to report hate speech to an online host is not all we can do. Justice Louis Brandeis, in a 1927 Supreme Court case, extolled the virtues of "counter-speech" to address objectionable speech.