The JackB

"When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'." Groucho Marx

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Did She Die?

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Barefoot Dancers

Sometimes I despise the sterility of email. The cold and unfeeling manner of text sent via electronics. You can be a master wordsmith and still fail miserably in your attempt to fill your words with warmth, caring and love.

I was on Facebook and I noticed that a friend had posted a photo album in memory of a sibling. As you might have guessed I am not especially close with this person. We are friendly and connected on Facebook because we did. The reason doesn’t really matter.

Anyway, many years ago I was friendly with their sibling but we lost touch. It must be 15 years or so since we last spoke. I was more than a little surprised to see this photo album. It didn’t offer any explanation about what happened, but it is hard to believe that someone would write in memory of about someone who is alive.

When I saw it I was shocked. They were my age and I was quite anxious to find out what happened. I don’t have a telephone number for my friend on Facebook and didn’t want to email them just to ask for it. We don’t have any mutual friends that I can contact to ask what happened.

I tried running a search but didn’t locate any information. But I couldn’t just ignore it. So I sent an email and asked what happened. I tried hard to write something appropriate, but I am not sure that such words exist.

It was far more tactful than the headline of this post. And now I find myself wondering what the answer to the question is. What happened and how. It throws me a bit. It is Elul, won’t be long before it is time to chant Unataneh Tokef.

So many questions.

Special Forces- Science Explains Their Reaction To Stress

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This is a very interesting article about why some people handle stress better than others do. Dr. Andy Morgan of Yale Medical School conducted research to determine why some people handle stress better than others do.

His research took him to Fort Bragg which where the Army’s elite Airborne and Special Forces school is located. Let’s take a look at an excerpt from the article.

“For Morgan, POW school was the perfect place to study who survives the best under acute stress. If you think it’s just training and the soldiers know they’re not really in serious danger, consider what Morgan discovered. During mock interrogations, the prisoners’ heart rates skyrocket to more than 170 beats per minute for more than half an hour, even though they aren’t engaging in any physical activity. Meanwhile, their bodies pump more stress hormones than the amounts actually measured in aviators landing on aircraft carriers, troops awaiting ambushes in Vietnam, skydivers taking the plunge or patients awaiting major surgery. The levels of stress hormones are sufficient to turn off the immune system and to produce a catabolic state, in which the body begins to break down and feed on itself. The average weight loss in three days is 22 pounds.

Morgan’s research—the first of its kind—produced some fascinating findings about who does the best job resisting the interrogators and who stays focused and clearheaded despite the uncontrollable fear. Morgan looked at two different groups going through this training: regular Army troops like infantrymen, and elite Special Forces soldiers, who are known to be especially “stress hardy” or cool under pressure. At the start or base line, the two groups were essentially the same, but once the stress began, and afterward, there were significant differences. Specifically, the two groups released very different amounts of a chemical in the brain called neuropeptide Y. NPY is an abundant amino acid in our bodies that helps regulate our blood pressure, appetite, learning and memory. It also works as a natural tranquilizer, controlling anxiety and buffering the effects of stress hormones like norepenephrine, one of the chemicals that most of us simply call adrenaline. In essence, NPY is one of the fire hoses that your brain uses to extinguish your alarm and fear responses by keeping the frontal-lobe parts of your brain working longer under stress.

Morgan found one very specific reason that Special Forces are superior survivors: they produce significantly greater levels of NPY compared with regular troops. In addition, 24 hours after completing survival training, Special Forces soldiers returned to their original levels of NPY while regular soldiers were significantly below normal.”

So if this NPY serves as a sort of natural anti-anxiety drug I have to ask the obvious question. Can we find a way to produce it? Maybe I am being naive, but from a laymen’s perspective it sounds like it could be a great resource for people. It might allow some people to stop taking their meds.

Another part of the article that I thought was interesting is the section in which they discussed heart rate variability. Take a look at this:

It turns out that the best survivors don’t have a lot of heart-rate variability. Instead, they’ve got “metronomic heartbeats”—their hearts thump steadily like metronomes—with almost no variability between beats. That is, the intervals between the beats are evenly spaced. Morgan believes that a metronomic heartbeat is an easy way to detect good survivors and high neuropeptide Y releasers. It makes sense biologically because your brainstem, which controls your heartbeat, has a high density of neuropeptide Y.

Part of what I found interesting was that the article says that metronomic heartbeat is associated with early heart disease and sudden death. So there is a question about whether this is really a benefit. It is good if you are a soldier or in some sort of very stressful profession.

But if it is tied to heart disease the negative can potentially outweigh the positive. Nice to stay calm, but not at the expense of not living past fifty.

And That’s The Way It Was- Goodbye Walter Cronkite

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I always liked Walter Cronkite. Grew up watching him on the news.

(CNN) — Walter Cronkite, the CBS anchorman known as “Uncle Walter” for his easygoing, measured delivery and “the most trusted man in America” for his rectitude and gravitas, has died, CBS reported Friday.

Cronkite was 92.

His career spanned much of the 20th century, as well as the first decade of the 21st. The native of St. Joseph, Missouri, broke in as a newspaper journalist while in college, switched over to radio announcing in 1935, joined the United Press wire service by the end of the decade and jumped to CBS and its nascent television news division in 1950. He also made his mark as an Internet contributor in his later years with a handful of columns for the Huffington Post.

He covered World War II’s Battle of the Bulge, the Nuremberg trials, several presidential elections, moon landings, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the Watergate scandal of President Richard Nixon’s administration.

At times he even made news: A 1977 question to then-Egyptian President Anwar Sadat about Sadat’s intent to go to Israel — at the time considered a nonstarter because of the lack of a treaty between the two countries — received a surprising “yes” from the Egyptian leader.

Soon after, Sadat traveled to Jerusalem, a trip that eventually led to the Camp David Accords, which included a peace deal between Israel and Egypt.

At his height of influence as CBS anchorman, Cronkite’s judgment was believed so important it could affect even presidents. In early 1968, after the Tet Offensive, Cronkite traveled to Vietnam and gave a critical editorial calling the Vietnam War “mired in stalemate.”

Noting Cronkite’s commentary, President Lyndon Johnson reportedly said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.” Johnson announced he would not seek re-election less than two months later.

More on Columbine

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Today is the ten year anniversary of the Columbine tragedy. Since many of my readers were on vacation last week I thought that I’d follow up on that post with another.

As I said in my initial post I have always been bothered by the attempt to explain the actions of the perpetrators of this atrocity as somehow having been tied into bullying.

It is understandable that in the face of tragedy people try to understand why things happen. But I cannot accept an explanation that absolves these two monsters of responsibility for their actions.

More importantly if you read some of the stories that have come out about that day you will see that Klebold and Harris were not the victims of bullying. Still, even if they had been there is no excuse for their actions. The majority of the world does not resort to violence in the face of mistreatment.

“(CNN) — What do you remember about April 20, 1999?

If you recall that two unpopular teenage boys from the Trench Coat Mafia sought revenge against the jocks by shooting up Columbine High School, you’re wrong.

But you’re not alone.

Ten years after the massacre in Littleton, Colorado, there’s still a collective memory of two Goth-obsessed loners, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who went on a shooting rampage and killed 12 of their classmates and a teacher, injured 23 others and then turned their guns on themselves.

Journalist and author Dave Cullen was one of the first to take on what he calls the myths of Columbine. He kept at it for a decade, challenging what the media and law enforcement officials reported.

“Kids had never been attacked in this kind of way until Columbine,” he recently told CNN. “I just had to find out what happened to those kids.”

Cullen’s book,”Columbine,” was released this month — just in time for today’s 10th anniversary of the shooting at the Colorado high school. While tackling popular misconceptions, Cullen also gives a riveting account of what happened that day and how the survivors view the event that marked their lives forever.

Cullen concluded that the killers weren’t part of the Trench Coat Mafia, that they weren’t bullied by other students and that they didn’t target popular jocks, African-Americans or any other group. A school shooting wasn’t their initial intent, he said. They wanted to bomb their school in an attack they hoped would make them more infamous than Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.”

If you think about it, that last sentence makes it all the more frightening.