Katrina Timeline

http://thinkprogress.org/katrina-timeline/

An excerpt:

Monday, August 29
7AM CDT – KATRINA MAKES LANDFALL AS A CATEGORY 4 HURRICANE [CNN]

8AM CDT – MAYOR NAGIN REPORTS THAT WATER IS FLOWING OVER LEVEE: “I’ve gotten reports this morning that there is already water coming over some of the levee systems. In the lower ninth ward, we’ve had one of our pumping stations to stop operating, so we will have significant flooding, it is just a matter of how much.” [NBC’s “Today Show”]

MORNING — BUSH CALLS SECRETARY CHERTOFF TO DISCUSS IMMIGRATION: “I spoke to Mike Chertoff today — he’s the head of the Department of Homeland Security. I knew people would want me to discuss this issue [immigration], so we got us an airplane on — a telephone on Air Force One, so I called him. I said, are you working with the governor? He said, you bet we are.” [White House]

MORNING – BUSH SHARES BIRTHDAY CAKE PHOTO-OP WITH SEN. JOHN MCCAIN [White House]

Destructive Emotions (and how to deal)

I mentioned a while back in this post that I have been listening to the book "Destructive Emotions" on CD:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/sarahmichigan/132239.html?mode=reply

I'm more and more impressed with the Dalai Lama and his branch of Buddhism. The book is largely a transcript of a multi-day meeting between Buddhists and brain scientists, and one of the big topics in the book is how to teach children "emotional and social intelligence"; that includes things like recognizing and coping with your own negative emotions, learning to recognize emotions in others, and learning to calm down and not react violently in response to negative emotions that arise. I was really impressed that he and the brain scientists agreed that it was necessary to find a secular way of presenting the information. How many evangelistic Christians would be so enthusiastic about turning the precepts of their religion into something secular to make it more widely accepted and applicable?

One highlight so far (I'm almost finished):

Typically, therapists who work with people who have explosive anger issues try to lengthen the time between when the person gets angry and when they act on that anger (i.e. "Take a deep breath and count to ten."). In Buddhist psychology, they believe in trying to catch the anger even earlier, and learning to notice the thought processes that lead up to the feeling of anger. Say a man is in line and someone cuts in front of him. He begins to think, "That's not fair. That person is a jerk." Then he gets angry. Then he is tempted to push the person or say something nasty. Traditional therapy would tell the man to breathe deep, count to ten, and not take action until he'd calmed down. The Buddhist approach is to try to catch yourself earlier, while you're in the "unfair" part of the thought process, and re-frame. "Maybe he didn't see me. Anyway, it's no big deal, and nothing worth losing my cool over." That way, you might even be able to stop yourself from getting really angry, much less acting on it.

I had more to say, but I'm running out of time. Maybe later.