"In 1977 Seattle Judge David Soukoup was concerned over making decisions about abused and neglected children's lives without sufficient information. He conceived of the idea of using trained community volunteers to speak for the best interests of these children in court. So successful was this Seattle program that soon judges across the country began utilizing citizen advocates. In 1990, the U.S. Congress encouraged the expansion of CASA with passage of the Victims of Child Abuse Act. Today more than 900 CASA program offices are in operation, with trained women and men serving as CASA volunteers."
"CASA volunteers are assigned to an abuse or neglect case by a judge. They conduct thorough research on the background of the case, reviewing documents, interviewing everyone involved, including the child. They make reports to the court, recommending what they believe is best for the child, providing the judge with information that will help her or him make an informed decision."
"CASA volunteers are instrumental in assuring that a child or family receives services which the court has ordered - things like substance abuse counseling or special education testing. During the life of a case, a CASA volunteer monitors the child's situation to make sure he remains safe. CASA volunteers may be the only constant the child knows as she moves through the labyrinth of the child welfare system."
by Maggie Callanan and Patricia Kelley and Dying Well by Ira Byock, from Amazon.com this morning. "Impressive insights into the experience of dying, offered by two hospice nurses with a gift for listening. The ``final gifts'' of the title are the comfort and enlightenment offered by the dying to those attending them, and in return, the peace and reassurance offered to the dying by those who hear their needs.
Five years after its first publication, with more than 150,000 copies in print, Final Gifts has become a classic. In this moving and compassionate book, hospice nurses Maggie Callanan and Patricia Kelley share their intimate experiences with patients at the end of life, drawn from more than twenty years experience tending the terminally ill.
Through their stories we come to appreciate the near-miraculous ways in which the dying communicate their needs, reveal their feelings, and even choreograph their own final moments; we also discover the gifts--of wisdom, faith, and love--that the dying leave for the living to share.
Filled with practical advice on responding to the requests of the dying and helping them prepare emotionally and spiritually for death, Final Gifts shows how we can help the dying person live fully to the very end "
"None of us gets out of here alive, but reading this book will lessen your fear of the ultimate end and give you some guidance about enjoying your life to the fullest right up until your final moment. Do people really enjoy life in the face of death? People do. The stories of individuals in Dr. Byock's book will move and inspire you to change your feelings about the end of your life, and also your feelings about your life in the present."
"This study of how to die well displays uncommon vitality. Byock, president elect of the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Care, is a gifted storyteller. Beginning with his own father's terminal illness, he details without scientific cant the process of decline that awaits most of us. The case studies, which form the humanistic soul of this work, never devolve into the maudlin or saccharine. Life on the edge of the great crossing is explored in all its sadness and pathos, but Byock also makes room for wisdom, hope and even the joy of final understanding. By recounting the passages of patients in his Missoula, Mont., practice, Byock makes a forceful case for hospice care and against physician-assisted suicide."
"A NEW DAY"
_________________________
Ecclesiastes 3:9-14 (NRSV)
"What gain have the workers from their toil? I have seen the business that God has given to everyone to be busy with. He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. I know that there is nothing better for them than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live; moreover, it is God's gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in all their toil. I know that whatever God does endures forever; nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it; God has done this, so that all should stand in awe before him."
_________________________
"The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness."
- Lamentations 3:22-23 (NRSV)
_________________________
"WE tend to take each new day for granted. The sun rose yesterday morning, and it will rise again tomorrow; that's the way the world is. Why give thanks for something so predictable?
We may be fooled by appearances into thinking that each day is much like every other. But today is a new day. Each day is a gift from God. No day has been like it before, and no day will be like it again. For me, this is above all a sign of hope.
My store of faith, hope, and love is limited and easily exhausted. I sometimes go to bed feeling weary, drained of energy and emotion, wanting only the oblivion of sleep. In gracious mercy, God uses the hours of darkness and sleep to restore me. In the morning I wake with fresh resources, ready for new opportunities, new experiences, and new encounters with other people. Who knows what God will do with this new day?
Prayer: Thank you, God, for each new day. We pray as Jesus taught us, saying, "Father, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread. Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who sins against us. And lead us not into temptation."* Amen."
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY:
Each day is a gift from God.
-- Margaret Price (Wiltshire, England)
PRAYER FOCUS: To be open to God today
*Luke 11:2-4 (NIV)
. The book is due out this month.
"...3 million, yes million, acres of open space are developed each year in this country; farmland is lost at the rate of 2 acres per minute; someone just entering middle age now who grew up in, say, Rockland County, New York, lived in a place with 17,360 acres of farmland—now there are 250, but check back in a few minutes. We can only compile the statistics and get out of the way, dumbfounded. No one knows what to do about it. There is nothing to do about it. The newspapers fill with stories containing incredible facts; apparently no one reads them. Occasionally there is an account of some monumental fight actually won, costing years of sweaty effort, and the prize is one development scaled back, one farm saved, a few acres that won't be logged, a Civil War battlefield protected though with givebacks, a single Wal-Mart backburnered. Meanwhile, scores of houses, health clubs, hospitals, and convenience stores and 2,378 Wal-Marts went up elsewhere."
"So green are these hills, and so round and so many, that they suggest the massive tumuli of some gigantic and immemorially ancient race of man. I have walked upon them and extracted from their timeless earthiness the profoundest peace which it is possible to know."
"Thanks for writing to us at Amazon.com.
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Super Bowl XL - February 5, 2006
Game Time: 3pm PST
. 
Page 138 - "These two factors - childhood poverty and a single-parent household are among the strongest predictors that a child will have a criminal future. Growing up in a single-parent home roughly doubles a a child's propensity to commit crime."
Page 169 - In discussing the factors that correlate to a good childhood education...."But whether a child's family is intact doesn't seem to matter. Just as the earlier studies show that family structure has little impact on a child's personality, it does not seem to affect his academic abilities either."
Page 158 - In discussing a lottery system where students applied to a "good" school and the lucky winners were selected by a drawing...the author's state, "It is true that the students who entered the Chicago student lottery were more likely to graduate than the students who didn't - which seems to suggest that school choice does make a difference. But that's an illusion. The proof is in this comparison: the students who won the lottery and went to a "better" school did no better than equivalent students who lost the lottery and were left behind." Statistically the students who went to the better schools "gained no benefit by changing schools."
Page 165 - The author's, having explained how the Chicago data showed schools don't matter, now explain why they do. "Black students are hardly the only ones to suffer in bad schools. White children in these schools also perform poorly. In fact, there is essentially no black-white test score gap within a bad school in the early years once you control for students backgrounds. But all students in a bad school, black and white, do lose ground to students in good schools......So according to these data, a child's school does have a clear impact on academic progress."
Page 132 - "Not that this is likely, but if the death penalty were assessed to anyone carrying an illegal gun, and if the penalty were actually enforced, gun crimes would surely plunge."
Page 173 - "There is another explanation for low-achieving adoptees which, though it may seem distasteful, jibes with the basic economic theory of self-interest: a woman who knows she will put her baby up for adoption may not take the same prenatal care as a woman who is keeping her baby. Consider - at the risk of futher distasteful thinking - how you treat a car you own versus a car you are renting for the weekend."
"Levitt fits everywhere and nowhere. He is a noetic butterfly that no one has pinned down (he was once offered a job on the Clinton economic team, and the 2000 Bush campaign asked him about being a crime advisor) but who is claimed by all. He has come to be acknowledged as a master of the simple, clever solution. He is the guy in the slapstick scenario, who sees all the engineers fultzing with a broken machine - and then realizes that no one has thought to plug it in."
"Leavitt is considered a demigod, one of the most creative people in economics and maybe in all social science."
"He (Leavitt) is genial, low-key and unflappable, confident but not cocky. He speaks with a considerable lisp. His appearance is High Nerd: a plaid button down shirt, nondescript khakis and a braided belt, brown sensible shoes. His pocket calendar is branded with the National Bureau of Economic Research logo."
"Another minor contributor to the falling homicide rate is the fact that some crack dealers took to shooting their enemies in the buttocks rather than murdering them; this method of violent insult was considered more degrading - and was obviously less severely punished - than murder."
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
author's Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner write,
"Some cheating leaves barely a shadow of evidence. In other cases, the evidence is massive. Consider what happened one spring evening at midnight in 1987: seven million American children suddenly disappeared. The worst kidnapping wave in history? Hardly. It was the night of April 15th, and the Internal Revenue Service had just changed a rule. Instead of merely listing each dependent child, tax filers were now required to provide a Social Security number for each child. Suddenly, seven million children - children who had existed only as phantom exemptions on the previous year's 1040 forms - vanished, representing about one in ten of all dependent children in the United States."
"He's done a hell of a job, because I'm not aware of any Arabian horses being killed in this storm," said Kate Hale, former Miami-Dade emergency management chief. "The world that this man operated in and the focus of this work does not in any way translate to this. He does not have the experience."
"An activity is presumed carried on for profit if it produced a profit in at least 3 of the last 5 tax years, including the current year. Activities that consist primarily of breeding, training, showing, or racing horses are presumed carried on for profit if they produced a profit in at least 2 of the last 7 tax years, including the current year. The activity must be substantially the same for each year within this period. You have a profit when the gross income from an activity exceeds the deductions."
"Interestingly, the information flow figures for U.S. consumption represent over 35% of the total original worldwide print information flow. While the U.S. is indeed the global leader in production and storage of information, these flow figures are largely influenced by the office document use in the U.S.. If the office documents component were removed from the equation, the U.S. accounts for slightly over 10% of the world's original information flow in print. This underlines the high use of paper in U.S. offices as compared to that in nations around the world.
There have been some changes in the creation of new information between our previous study and the current one, but most of the changes have been fairly small except in the area of office documents. Contrary to notions of paperless offices floated in the late 80s and early 90s, the consumption of office paper has gone up substantially in the recent years, especially following the move to laser/inkjet printers from dot matrix printers. Paper use in offices has further risen with the increasing speed of laser printing coupled with its decreasing cost. Each year, almost 500 billion copies are produced on copiers in the United States; nearly 15 trillion copies are produced on copiers, printers, and multi-function machines. (Source: XeroxParc)."
"Print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media produced about 5 exabytes of new information in 2002. Ninety-two percent of the new information was stored on magnetic media, mostly in hard disks.
* How big is five exabytes? If digitized with full formatting, the seventeen million books in the Library of Congress contain about 136 terabytes of information; five exabytes of information is equivalent in size to the information contained in 37,000 new libraries the size of the Library of Congress book collections."
"Middle-aged individuals who exercise vigorously enough to perspire and breathe hard for 20 to 30 minutes at least twice a week may reduce their risk of Alzheimer’s disease by 60 percent, according to a Lancet Neurology study released online Oct. 4, 2005."
“It’s looking more and more as if getting off the couch is one of the best things you can do for yourself,” says William H. Thies, Ph.D., Alzheimer’s Association vice president, medical and scientific affairs. “Exercise has strong benefits for your heart and overall well-being, and this study adds to a growing body of evidence that it also plays a vital role in keeping your brain healthy. This work is in line with other research suggesting a relatively modest amount of effort can have a big impact. You don’t have to run marathons.”
- The Best Lost, Tossed, and Forgotten Items from Around the World
"This art should be judged for the pleasure it brings the viewer, not for its financial worth. If you like a piece, if it makes you happy, then it's a valuable piece. Having occasionally briefly worked in a gallery, I can't tell you how many customers asked me which piece was "worth more". My answer then, as it is now, is that the piece you like the best is worth the most.
For me, this type of art has a visceral appeal. It strikes me on an almost cellular level, rather than on an intellectual one. You should never let anyone else tell you what's "good" and what has "value". There are many well known artists whose work draws huge prices that do absolutely nothing for me. And there are artists that I find appealing who aren't favored by the big shot critics. Buy for yourself, as you're the person who will have to look at the art every day."
Number of Chicken Soup For The Soul Books
Total Self Improvement Market:
2000: $5.7 billion
2004: $8.5 billion
2008: $12 billion (estimated)
Number of Americans who take antidepressants: 20 million
Fastest Growing Market for antidepressants: Preschoolers
Number of ads a typical kid sees by age sixteen: 6 million
Number of breast augmentations in 2000: 187,755
maybe in the 21st century we can "Tune out, Turn Off, and Drop In" - on a neighbor, friend, or family member.
"Just one local call and you'll see
A happy path through life not for free
A little bit fat you can’t get a girl
Short on cash I'll change your world
The only way now is straight up
Your deepest despair I'll make it stop
Just 19.95 all major credit cards
And you'll stay alive and you'll go far "
from the San Francisco Longshoreman Philospher Writer - Eric Hoffer.
