http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2012/01/31/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon

This coming MONDAY, February 6, at 7-8pm Pacific (instead of Sunday, because I hear there's this Superbowl thingie on Sunday), another very special guest, Dr. Robin Stern, author of a book that's helped many, many of my readers stop being victimized by partners, bosses, and others in their lives. I write about it here:

What your boyfriend's doing to you is "gaslighting," which, unfortunately, only sounds like lighting farts on fire. It's actually insidious emotional abuse that gets its name from the 1944 Ingrid Bergman movie, Gaslight, about an heiress whose husband makes small changes around their home (like making their gas-powered lights flicker), then denies anything's different, making her believe her sanity's gone off its hinges. In a relationship, writes Dr. Robin Stern in The Gaslight Effect, you're being gaslighted when somebody relentlessly pressures you to believe the unbelievable and do what you know you shouldn't. Stern explains that the gaslighter "needs to be right in order to preserve his own sense of self and his sense of having power in the world," while the gaslightee allows him to bully away her sense of reality and self because she fears losing his love and approval. Of course, in your case, it could have something to do with not wanting to think you've wasted five years with "a selfish, manipulative ass." (Fart-play suddenly sounding inviting?)

Dr. Robin Stern show link here:

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2012/02/07/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon

And this is a totally unnecessary train (and I say that as a train lover). It's $59 from LA to SF on Southwest if you book in advance. (And the train couldn't really run high speed -- so it was really a "high speed" train.) Steve Lopez writes (opinionlessly) in the LA Times:

The projected completion date has gone from 2020 to 2033. The anticipated cost has ballooned to as high as $117 billion, and no one seems to have a clue where the bulk of the money would come from. The state auditor and the state Legislative Analyst's Office have raised serious concerns, and the rail authority's own peer review group said the project represents "an immense financial risk" to the state. And two weeks ago, the railroad authority's top executive resigned.

To top it off, a poll last fall said nearly two-thirds of registered voters would run this train off the rails if they had a chance to vote again.

I wish voters would be smart before the money is spent but it seems, no matter how often stuff like this happens, you can always count on them to be gullible.

Tim Cavanaugh in reason on Lopez here:

Lopez has the good fortune to answer to the newsroom rather the opinion section, where bullet-train belief still reigns as supremely as it does in Gov. Jerry Brown's rumpus room. The important thing is that one more prominent Golden State blowhard is sealing the case against the vacant and bankrupt high-speed rail project.

At the link within, Cavanaugh writes about the moronism from the LATimes' pro-train opinionoids:

In a piece I missed earlier this month entitled "Keeping faith with California's bullet train," the ed board praised the High-Speed Rail project because it is similar to Boston's notorious Big Dig and the building of the pyramids by slaves.

Campaigners have long complained that without a legal right to see their children, fathers can be excluded, particularly when a split has been acrimonious. By creating the new right for children, ministers hope that judges ruling on custody disputes will ensure more equal access for both parents.

A former unpaid intern for the fashion magazine Harper's Bazaar filed a lawsuit on Wednesday, accusing its parent company, the Hearst Corporation, of violating federal and state wage and hour laws by not paying her even though she often worked there full time.

In her lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, the intern, Xuedan Wang, and her law firm are asking to make the case a class action on behalf of what they say are hundreds of unpaid interns at Heart Magazines, which also publishes Cosmopolitan, Seventeen and Good Housekeeping.

Employment experts say a growing number of young people, hundreds of thousands of them, do unpaid internships each year as they seek to get a foot in the door and gain work experience.

..."Unpaid interns are becoming the modern-day equivalent of entry-level employees, except that employers are not paying them for the many hours they work," said Adam Klein, one of the lawyers for Ms. Wang. "The practice of classifying employees as 'interns' to avoid paying wages runs afoul of federal and state wage and hour laws."

...The lawsuit pointed to guidelines from the United States Labor Department, which state that unpaid internships are only lawful in the context of an educational training program, when the interns do not displace regular employees and the employer derives no immediate advantage from the intern's work. The guidelines also state another criterion for internships to be unpaid: "the internship experience is for the benefit of the intern."

Ms. Wang's lawyers said that by treating her and others as interns rather than regular employees, they were denied not only wages, but also Social Security contributions and the right to receive unemployment insurance and workers' compensation.

Alexandra Schmid took the cash from a Bangladeshi passenger's jacket as it went along an X-ray conveyor belt Wednesday night in Terminal 4, said Al Della Fave, spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey's police force.

Surveillance video showed Schmid taking the money from a jacket pocket, wrapping the cash in a plastic glove and taking it to a bathroom, Della Fave said.

The money hasn't been recovered, he said. Police are investigating whether Schmid gave it to another person in the bathroom.

The 31-year-old Schmid was arrested on a charge of grand larceny and suspended pending an investigation. Her attorney's name wasn't immediately known.

Schmid, who lived in Brooklyn, had worked for the TSA for 4½ years, TSA spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein said.

"We do hold our officers to very high standards, and we have a zero tolerance policy for theft in the workplace," Farbstein said.

Farbstein continued, "Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah." And everyone just nodded their heads like bobblehead dolls.

via @mpetrie98

Like alcohol and tobacco, sugar is a toxic, addictive substance that should be highly regulated with taxes, laws on where and to whom it can be advertised, and even age-restricted sales, says a team of UCSF scientists.

In a paper published in Nature on Wednesday, they argue that increased global consumption of sugar is primarily responsible for a whole range of chronic diseases that are reaching epidemic levels around the world.

Sugar is so heavily entrenched in the food culture in the United States and other countries that getting people to kick the habit will require much more than simple education and awareness campaigns, the UCSF scientists said.

It's going to require public policy that gently guides people toward healthier choices and uses brute force to remove sugar from so many of the processed foods we eat every day, said Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist at UCSF.

"The only method for dealing with this is a public health intervention," Lustig said in an interview. "Everyone talks about personal responsibility, and that won't work here, as it won't for any addictive substance. These are things that have to be done at a governmental level, and government has to get off its ass."

How was it that I was able to cut out sugar without anyone taxing it through the roof or banning it? Hmmm...either I have magical powers...or...I read the science on sugar and carbohydrates like flour, starchy vegetables, and juice and decided I'd rather be healthy than eat them, and applied the requisite self-discipline.

I eat a scoop of chocolate gelato about once a week, but otherwise have zero sugar or flour, and subsist...yes, weep for me...on bacon, steak, heavily buttered green beans, omelets, cheese, dry italian sausage, and salad with a lot of dressing on it.

What I eat, contrary to what the AMA and the government have contended is healthy for years, is an extremely healthy diet...one that keeps me slim, keeps my skin young, and leads me to need far less sleep and exercise that I ever could have imagined. Listen to my radio show with Dr. Michael Eades and Dr. Mary Dan Eades for more on this.

via Overlawyered

How will you be celebrating...or...for you, has Valentine's Day jumped the big chocolate truffle shark?

This lame-brain act of over-regulation is part of a dumbing down of playgrounds that has been going on for decades. Twenty years ago, when my son turned 3, they took a soaring swing away from the neighborhood recreation center. I drove from suburb to suburb, seeking out equipment with more kick than the mounds of safety-first molded plastic he'd outgrown in our L.A. neighborhood.

A couple of years later, my daughter's preschool was ordered to rip out its monkey bars. I took them home and put them outside my kitchen window. They became her gym, secret clubhouse and pretend castle. I watched her and her friends fill with pride as they progressed from swinging hand-over-hand across the bars to hanging by their knees and then finally walking across the top.

Risky? Perhaps, but I saw a greater risk in having children bored to tears or flat-lining on video games or TV. And the research bears me out.

Even if the new playgrounds are safer -- and that is disputed -- children need to master progressive physical challenges to develop the confidence and judgment necessary for everyday life, playground experts say. Otherwise they grow up anxious and fearful. Playground thrills also make children smarter.

"If you create sanitized play areas, children are bored and their brains go to sleep," said lawyer Philip K. Howard, author of The Death of Common Sense, who has written about ridiculous playground regulations.

Kids generally resist flinging themselves over the side of a two-story tower. They take calculated risks. I recall the first time I ventured onto the park merry-go-round, clinging to the center while the big kids spun us around. As I got older, I slowly moved to the edge, finally dropping my head back over the side to watch the sky spin crazily above my head.

It was a rush. But now merry-go-rounds, seesaws and tall slides are disappearing. Wright-Chrystal told Stocking that instead of replacing the climbing structure she could introduce other activities, like balls or hopscotch.

Hopscotch! Whoopee!!

We're soon going to be a nation of weenies. For this coddled generation growing up, will they change Marines slogan to "The Few, the Frightened..."?

What are your predictions for the kids of the padded playground...the kids who aren't allowed to bring a paring knife to cut an apple to school? Zero challenge, zero tolerance, zero need to think for this generation (just say no! Well, that is, except to your Tiger Mom).

Via Overlawyered

Just in, this emailed press release: "For Valentine's Day - Catch Him or Her In The Act!" (promoing surveillance services...awww, how sweet!)

Avoid this sort of issue entirely with this terrific book about living while awake by Nathaniel Branden, The Art of Living Consciously: The Power of Awareness to Transform Everyday Life.

Sanchez says they left her on the floor for 35 minutes, with her daughter screaming for her mommy in the other room.

"I was told not to move, so I didn't move," she tells WBZ, out of fear that she'd be shot.

Eventually the feds figured out they were in the wrong spot and they arrested the suspect they were after in the next door apartment.

Sanchez can't believe that a two-year long federal investigation ended at the wrong door.

"The looks on their faces when they knew they got the wrong door was priceless," she recalls. "They looked at each other dumbfounded."

Sanchez says another agent came by later that day to offer an apology, but it was one that Sanchez felt wasn't quite genuine.

"For me it felt routine apology, it felt like just a regular, 'I'm sorry for the inconvenience. Here's the phone number for your landlord to get reimbursed for the door, have a good day.'

And that's how I felt, like it was a smack in the face."

She's just lucky that she wasn't standing there with a phone in her hand they could mistake for a gun.

The drug war is too often a war on innocent citizens -- as fought by the Three Stooges in cop uniforms.

•No one likes to say they got engaged next to the laundry machine. Pick a location or restaurant that she loves or take her to your favorite green spot. Whether a mountaintop or an organic restaurant, your soon-to-be fiancée will appreciate a carefully selected location.

"No one likes to say they got engaged next to the laundry machine"? Sounds romantic to me. More than fancyschmancy trite-orama.

Best is that she suggests people bathe before proposing:

•Look the part. Shower with your organic bath products, wear an outfit you know she loves, and put on a non-toxic deodorant or cologne (check the Environmental Working Groups Skindeep database to see how yours ranks today).

Oh, hurl. And two with the bad advice of making the proposal a crowd scene:

•Does she love an audience? Purchase tickets to a concert or theatrical presentation and propose in front of a crowd.

•Make it a party. Surround her with the people she loves the most for an engagement with an audience. Keep some chilled organic sparkling wine on hand to pass around after you pop the question.

You'll need some grain alcohol if she says no before a studio audience. Not everyone loves the public proposal, as I wrote in "Aisle Be Embarrassing You":

There are public people and then there are private people, like my boyfriend, who'd react to a surprise birthday party with the enthusiasm he'd have for a surprise prostate exam.