Daniel Chambers

And in the More Good News department... A little Colorado girl, Charlotte, develops seizures so bad that she loses the ability to speak, and has up to 300 grand mal episodes weekly (averaging 1 seizure every half hour). Her parents exhaust the available treatment options, then turn to a medical marijuana strain known as R4 that's low in THC but high in cannabidiol (CBD). Today, the 6-year-old Charlotte thrives. Her episodes reduced from 300/wk to 1 or 2 per month. The R4 strain has been renamed "Charlotte's Web" and it's being used to treat epilepsy and cancer in 41 others. http://edition.cnn.com/2013/08/07/health/charlotte-child-medical-marijuana/?hpt=us_c2

Thanks for sharing. You make it sound like a little slice of heaven over there. How extensive and expensive was the expatriation process? Is there a website with accurate information on the employment rate in Costa Rica, something like the American Bureau of Labor Statistics?

The following links are sites that don't always update daily, but they have an overall positive tone. http://www.dailygood.org/ http://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/ http://positivepsychologynews.com/

Pepin, What is IFS? Alan, That's quite sad. And her husband is "her manager," which isn't helping to steer her in the most positive of directions I'd imagine.

Poor lady. It wouldn't surprise me if, as a kid, she was told by an adult family member (or several of them) that she was ugly, fat, unlovable, and similar garbage. Given that she has departed from reality internally and externally, I assume she underwent some very intense abuse that will take years of therapy, if not decades of treatment, to recover from. Hopefully her mind, her self-image, isn't too far gone. Very sad.

This TED Talk by Eleanor Longden covers how she started hearing voices while attending college, how bad it got, and how she realized the voices were echoing her childhood trauma. She aruges that "an important question in psychiatry shouldn't be 'What's wrong with you?' but rather, 'What's happened to you?'"

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200306/our-brains-negative-bias "The brain, Cacioppo demonstrated, reacts more strongly to stimuli it deems negative. There is a greater surge in electrical activity. Thus, our attitudes are more heavily influenced by downbeat news than good news." _________________ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias "Negativity bias is the psychological phenomenon by which humans pay more attention to and give more weight to negative rather than positive experiences or other kinds of information. "In the brain, there are two different systems for negative and positive stimuli. The left hemisphere, which is known for articulate language, is specialized for positive experiences; whereas, the right hemisphere focuses on negative experiences. Another area of the brain used for the negativity bias is the amygdala. This specific area of the brain uses about two-thirds of its neurons searching for negative experiences. Once the amygdala starts looking for the bad news, it is stored into long-term memory. "Positive experiences have to be held in awareness for more than twelve seconds in order for the transfer from short-term memory to long-term memory to take place. We remember more after we hear disapproving or disappointing news than before; this shows how the brain processes criticism. "As a result, Cliff Nass, professor of communication from Stanford University has suggested managers offer praise after criticism, not before, so that the praise actually makes an impression on the receiver. Implicit memory registers and responds to negative events almost immediately. It takes five to twenty seconds for positive experiences to even register in the brain. "Emotional information revolves within the limbic system. Therefore, the limbic system ties perfectly into the negativity bias."

YMS, I think, in context, Jose may have meant "athiests + don't know they are statists." Personally, I didn't care for politics until my belief in God started to wane. I needed to fill that void with something and a political position was a ready alternative. As it turns out, having an attitude of "how can I help?" fills that void nicely.

General Hayden probably wants Snowden dead because he gave Glenn Greenwald "15,000 to 20,000 classified documents", according to a Reuters writer: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/07/us-usa-security-snowden-brazil-idUSBRE97600L20130807

Post retracted.