August 27, 2004
Communication Breakdown – Communication Breakthrough: Being Whole in the Heat (A Six-Week Class Starting 9/15/04)
(Another Wednesday evening class in process work from Lane Arye, who is now my advisor in the graduate school program I'm starting next week)
Communication Breakdown – Communication Breakthrough:
Being Whole in the Heat
A Six Week Series of Classes in Worldwork and Process Work
with Lane Arye, Ph.D.
Skillful communication can be very helpful in conflict situations. What happens, though, when communication breaks down, either because we have never learned skillful communication, because the “correct” way does not go along with our cultural or personal style, because we are feeling too much emotion, or because we are too deep in the conflict to remember what we know? Then it can be useful to trust the process, to follow the wisdom of our bodies, to let our double messages and “wrong” communication lead the way.
In this series of classes, we will learn and practice communication tools that can help us to be more effective and compassionate, to get our point across and really listen. We will also learn to follow ourselves when we are in the heat. Through group process, individual work, theory, discussion, and practical exercises, we will learn to be more fluid, authentic, playful, and free with friends, enemies, lovers, and co-workers.
TIME: 7pm to 10pm
DATES: Wednesdays September 15, 22, 29, October 6, 13, 27
COST: $20 per class (Need-based fees considered)
CONTACT: Lane (510) 558-8805
WHERE: 1452 Cornell Avenue. Berkeley (Please park in lot across street)
All are welcome to the first class. Commitment required after first class.
PROCESS WORK and WORLDWORK offer powerful and effective tools that can help us to work toward wholeness, well-being, social justice, and community. Developed by Arnold Mindell, Ph.D. (author of Sitting in the Fire, Dreambody, etc.) and his colleagues from around the world, Process Work and Worldwork are based on a trust that even the most disturbing experiences – including physical illness, conflicts and world issues – can lead us in the direction of change, growth, and connection.
LANE ARYE, Ph.D. is an internationally known Process Worker and Worldworker. In the Balkans, he co-led a UN-funded project working with Serbs, Croats, and Muslims on ethnic tension, war-related trauma, and community building. Lane has also worked with conflicts between high-caste and low-caste Hindus from India, anti-Semitism in Germany and Poland, as well as racism, sexism, nationalism, homophobia, and class issues in the US and Europe. Author of Unintentional Music: Releasing Your Deepest Creativity, Lane lives with his wife, Lecia, and has a private practice in Berkeley and San Rafael.
http://www.ProcessWorkLane.com/
No Mega-Casino in San Pablo, This Year
"This story isn't over yet," commented Debbie Notkin. She was right:
San Pablo casino won't get OK in 2004
Governor gives up after lawmakers oppose compact
John M. Hubbell, Chronicle Sacramento Bureau
Friday, August 27, 2004
Sacramento – A deal to create a huge tribal-owned casino in San Pablo was declared dead for the year late Thursday when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration said it would not push for approval in the face of lingering bipartisan opposition. ...
August 24, 2004
"As Soon as You Take Their Money, You Owe Them Something"
The story of the advent of casino-style gambling at Casino San Pablo, here in the Bay Area, has been unfolding with no little drama.
California State Senate leader John Burton, the San Francisco Democrat who is titular head of the city's Burton Machine, announced last Friday that Democrats had blocked the original plan to expand CSP to a super-colossal casino with 5,000 slot machines. The Democrats favored a plan where CSP would only expand to a jumbo casino with only 2,500 slots, half as many as was agreed originally between the Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Lytton Band of Pomo Indians. On Saturday US Senator Dianne Feinstein (RD-Calif) chimed in, calling the agreement between the Lytton Pomos and the Governator "unconscionable" and "totally unacceptable."
The Lytton Pomos acceded to Burton's demand on Sunday, so quickly that I cannot help but suspect that this was a smoothly directed piece of political theater, that the original plan was intended to be so outlandish that the "compromise" reached, the target actually aimed for, would seem small in comparison. The Governator and representatives of the Lytton Pomos signed the revised agreement on Monday.
But wait ... there's more! Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross, crackerjack investigative journalists for the San Francisco Chronicle, reported in Sunday's edition of the Chronicle that Joe and Gavin Maloof, part of the management team slated to run the expanded CSP for the Lytton Pomos, organized a fundraiser last February that netted more than a million dollars for the Governator's campaign war chest. The Maloof brothers own the Sacramento Kings, as well as the Palms casino resort in Las Vegas.
Matier and Ross point out that during the recall campaign that put him in office, the Governator denounced the role of special-interest money in politics: "As soon as you take their money," they quote him as having said, "you owe them something.'' In that same campaign, the Governator slammed his leading opponent, Cruz Bustamante, for accepting campaign contributions from tribal interests while the state was in negotiation with them over gambling compacts.
A spokesman for the Governator told Matier and Ross on background, "It's our understanding that (Joe) Maloof wasn't engaged in any discussions to manage the casino at the time of the February event, and we never had any indication of his participation until after the agreement was reached.'' How convenient for the Governator.
August 18, 2004
The Slot Machine that Devoured San Pablo
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Lytton Band of Pomo Indians have reportedly reached an agreement to turn Casino San Pablo into the third-largest casino in the U.S., eclipsed only by the Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods in Connecticut.
According to a story in today's San Francisco Chronicle, up to 5,000 slot machines would be housed in a building, six to eight stories tall, featuring two gaming floors, six restaurants and bars, and entertainments areas. The deal between the Governator and the Lytton Pomos also features a guarantee that no other casino could open within a 35-mile radius of CSP, a region which includes San Francisco, most of the Peninsula, the East Bay, and large chunks of Marin, Sonoma, Napa, and Solano counties. In return, CSP would turn over 25% of its gambling revenues to the state.
The giant casino will be run by the Rumsey Band of Wintun Indians, who operate the casino at Cache Creek, and the Maloof family (who own the Palms casino-resort in Las Vegas, as well as the Sacramento Kings basketball team) will be backing the project financially. The Chronicle story gives no indication of the extent to which poker will be featured in the giant casino.
The giant casino is to be built within the next two years on "a nine-acre sliver of land" that is the site of the current CSP cardroom.
August 16, 2004
Hitting the Jackpot
So there I was in the $20-$40 hold'em game at Lucky Chances, stuck about $600 and becoming increasingly amazed at the hands with which the other players were either raising or cold-calling raises. Holding offsuit 76 two seats ahead of the button, with two limpers ahead of me, I semi-fishily limped in. The button trailed in, the small blind folded, and the big blind checked.
The flop came 6-4-4 with two spades on the board, giving me two pair. I didn't fear an overpair (at this table, pocket pairs seemed to be raising hands), but there was a chance someone held a 4. The action was checked to me, and I bet. The player on the button raised, and one of the early limpers called.
The turn card was another 6, giving me the current best possible full house. Early limper checked, I checked, button bet, early limper called. I think that the action is consistent with both of them having fours in their hands, and if someone else has a six, well, the guy with the four is still going along for the ride. I raised. The button dropped out. Early limper reraised me. (!) Okay, it's a split pot, but I still have boss full house. I reraised, going all-in for the amount of a full bet. While the dealer is burning and turning the river card, I turn my own cards over, fully expecting a split pot.
The clown god loves a good schmengie: I was a 902:1 dog on the flop and a 41:1 dog on the turn, but I hung in there! The river card was the case six, for a board of 4-4-6-6-6, giving me four sixes with a seven for a kicker, while the other guy had pocket fours, having flopped quads and being beat by runner-runner. (I'm including the fact that the player on the button had pocket nines in these odds.)
Lucky Chances' jackpot was at $47,000. Loser's share is 50%, winner's share 20%, and the remaining 30% split among the other players in the hand. My share was $9400 (less 25% withheld for tax). I toked $400 to the dealer, Michael Hornholtz.
Mike Caro says that one problem with bad-beat jackpots is that the winners' shares often leave the poker economy. This is certainly true in my case: the lion's share of it is going to pay for my tuition this fall. I think there's something kewl about being able to pay one's tuition from the winnings of a single hand of poker.
Apart from the jackpot, which I'm accounting separately in my poker records, I finished down $380 in that session. Dammit, I hate it when I lose!
August 15, 2004
Life Is Too Short to Read rec.gambling.poker
Paul Phillips is wading through the muck of Usenet newsgroup rec.gambling.poker so that you don't have to. Two of the diamonds in the muck he has found are:
you are obviously to stoooopid to have a job
Once upon a time, back in the day when you could have an intelligent conversation about sex on alt.sex, rec.gambling.poker had a reputation of being one of the better, more congenial newsgroups on any topic on the Net. I started reading it regularly a little past its heyday, in 1997. Nevertheless, it was reading r.g.p. that gave me the foundation of my poker skills and the direction to build them and hone them. There was a core group consisting of a blend of Internet geeks and people who played for a living (and one could watch some of the former transition into the latter). Mathematical theory was developed and promulgated. It was a valuable resource for people of just about any level of experience. Mike Caro was a regular participant, and David Skansky and Mason Malmuth intermittently so. We got to watch the emergence of today's generation of world-class players, people like John Juanda and Dan Negreanu, through their posts.
Alas, the culture of flamewar and trash-talk emerged to dominate the group's discourse. I no longer recommend it as a place for new people to learn about poker and the poker community.
Want to learn how to play poker, and participate in a vigorous community of people like yourself? Go to Two Plus Two. Don't waste your time with r.g.p.
30-Year-Old Injustice Overturned
U.S. Military Clears A-Team of Charges
WASHINGTON, DC — After more than 30 years spent hiding in the Los Angeles underground as wanted criminals, the members of the crack commando unit Alpha Team, commonly known as the A-Team, were cleared of all charges brought against them by the U.S. military, an army official announced Monday.
"In 1972, we arrested the members of the A-Team for a crime they swore they didn't commit," Gen. Stephen Lupo said. "They broke out of our maximum-security stockade, and from that moment forth, I thought of nothing but their recapture. However, a recent audit of their file has revealed that the arrest of the Alpha Force members was made in error. The U.S. military deeply regrets the mistake." ...
[Cpt. H.M. "Howlin' Mad"] Murdock and the surviving members of the team — the classically handsome Lt. Templeton Arthur "Face" Peck and the Mohawk-sporting mechanic, Sgt. Bosco "B.A." Baracus — said their joy over the announcement was tempered only by regret that their de-facto leader, Col. John "Hannibal" Smith, was not alive to see their names cleared.
(via Joe Decker)
August 14, 2004
TV Poker and Table Image
Paul Phillips is thinking about the implications of televised poker:
I was never in the camp that having my hole cards exposed to the world would be detrimental to my results; I was indifferent because television almost never gives you enough context and unless you understand WHY a player does what he does, you are no closer to predicting his future actions.But now I feel like I'm totally in a position to manipulate people who have seen me play on TV. Since I know exactly what's been on TV I can assemble a model of myself based on that and (with numerous caveats) grant that model to strangers. If you can form an accurate sense of your opponent's model of you and make the correct adjustments, you have a monster advantage.
I think this could work very well against rank-and-file players. I'm not so sure, though, about world-class players who might have played many hours against Paul and have their own mental models of his play, formed independently from any TV broadcasts. (Of course, there are a lot more rank-and-file players than world-class players.)
Friday the Thirteenth Fell on a Friday This Month...
... But that didn't stop the action at the Oaks Club. It was only a notch short of crazy last night. Huh? I though gamblers were supposed to be superstitious.
I played in the $6-$12 hold'em game for a while, then they started a must-move $15-$30 game. The 15-30 game was at a stud table, nine-handed, as all the larger hold'em tables in the place were in use.
I was lucky in that I got good cards, and even luckier in getting soft opponents, the kind who cold-call raises, and see any showdown when they've flopped a pair. I could describe some hands to illustrate, but most of the ones I won were boring, and the interesting ones were bad beats, and who wants to read bad beat stories, especially when I was in a good mood and winning and the beats seemed like proof of how good the game was? I walked away having more than doubled the cash I had put into play.
Debbie also played, in the Omaha game. She came away from her game with a philosophical question. What is worse, an Omaha game with a succession of bad and inexperienced dealers, or an Omaha game with a succession of bad and inexperienced dealers and five self-appointed table captains?
Terror Alerts Explained
Betty Bowers, America's Best Christian, brings us a guide to the Department of Homeland Security terror alert levels that makes everything clear:
(via Heaven Conquistadore)
August 11, 2004
August 10, 2004
Burning Khan
In the comments on 14cyclenotes' LiveJournal there's a discussion going about the Bush administration's burning of Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan, the al Qaeda member arrested in Lahore last month who had been cooperating with Pakistani authorities in identifying other al Qaeda members in Pakistan and in Britain. The leak of Khan's name is being compared to last year's blowing of the cover of CIA undercover operative Valerie Plame by Scooter Libby an as-yet-unidentified Bush Administration official.
We won't know the full story in either case until the dust settles. But at this point in time it appears that the key difference between the Plame case and the Khan case is that Plame was burned as an act of political malice, whereas Khan's name was divulged because the "senior White House officials" who divulged it were unaware of the consequences.
The Boston Globe today reported many details of the gaffe that quashed the ongoing operation.
Here's what happened: After Tom Ridge gave his August 1 press conference saying that the terror alert was based on new information, "senior government officials" gave a backgrounder on the issue. A "backgrounder" is sort of like a press conference, except that the person at the front of the room answering questions is not to be identified. (It's chief purpose seems to be to lend information authenticity by making it seem to newspaper readers like the information is a hot tip from a covert source rather than just another of serving of prepared spin by the flacks.)
After the official backgrounder, the members of the press corps went off to buttonhole their individual intelligence, terrorism, or national security contacts. The guy who spoke to the Globe reporters didn't give any names. The guy who talked to the Times reporters gave Khan's name, and the Times printed it.
It's all part of the spin cycle. Whoever manages that cycle -- maybe Andy Card, maybe Scott McClellan, I don't know -- knows which "senior White House official" spoke to the Times.
In an administration that cared about successes and failures, the guy who spoke to the Times would be hung out to dry. But no matter how catastrophic the results of their bungles and gaffes might be, Bush staffers' jobs are secure so long as they are loyal to the cause.
Good, thorough analysis of the Khan affair can be found at Juan Cole's Informed Comment, beginning here.
August 08, 2004
The Dude Abides
The New York Times reports on the fandom that has emerged around Joel and Ethan Coen's 1998 film The Big Lebowski.
August 05, 2004
Pot for PTSD?
The Sydney Morning Herald cites the newspaper Ma'ariv, reporting that the Israeli Defense Force's medical corps is testing cannibis as a treatment for stress symptoms in soldiers who have served in the West Bank and Gaza.
(via TalkLeft)
August 04, 2004
Dick Cheney, Crook
Josh Marshall has the goods on Dick Cheney. The New York Times reports:
The Halliburton Company secretly changed its accounting practices when Vice President Dick Cheney was its chief executive, the Securities and Exchange Commission said yesterday as it fined the company $7.5 million and brought actions against two former financial officials.The commission said the accounting change enabled Halliburton, one of the nation's largest energy services companies, to report annual earnings in 1998 that were 46 percent higher than they would have been had the change not been made. It also allowed the company to report a substantially higher profit in 1999, the commission said.
Given that Halliburton is paying a hefty fine for what can only be described as deliberate fraud, the Times is remarkably gentle in its reporting. So is the SEC. Josh Marshall sez:
The SEC and the even the Times goes to some length to avoid the colloquial term for this sort of behavior: i.e., fraud. The SEC did levy the fine. And it did point the finger of blame at two lower levels Halliburton officials. Yet the SEC, in the words of the Times, "did not detail the extent to which [Cheney] was aware of the change or of the requirement to disclose it to investors." And not surprisingly, in the article, Cheney's lawyer, Terrence O'Donnell is trumpeting the results of the investigation as a clean bill of health for Cheney. ...So here you have the Vice President of the United States. His company gets caught in about as clear a case of cooking the books to inflate profits as you can imagine during the time he was CEO. (His salary and bonuses are tied to company profits.) And he won't even go to the trouble of denying that he was aware of the wrongdoing.
Can we have some more aggressive reporting on this one?
I second the motion. Cheney, it is now clear, is cut from the same cloth as Dennis Koslowski or Ken Lay. Maybe John Edwards can work this into his stump speech?
Update: Billmon, at the Whiskey Bar, goes into substantial detail on the what and the why of the cooking of the Halliburton books, and why it is highly likely (if not necessarily provable) that Cheney had his hand in it.
August 03, 2004
Creativity in Thirteen Easy Lessons
Hugh MacLeod has posted How to Be Creative on his blog gapingvoid. It consists of a page of thirteen bullet-points, with links to subsequent posts elaborating on those points. For example:
6. Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten.Then when you hit puberty they take the crayons away and replace them with books on algebra etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the creative bug is just a wee voice telling you, "I’d like my crayons back, please."
Other advice includes "Keep your day job" and "Put the hours in". Sounds simple. It's also valuable. Check it out.
(via Boing Boing)
Gregg Easterbrook, Flat-Earther
The editorial standards of The New Republic are even lower than I had supposed. Brad DeLong has delivered a smackdown to TNR's senior editor Gregg Easterbrook. Easterbrook has taken the news that Stephen Hawking has refined some of his key ideas on the nature of gravitational collapse and black holes as an opportunity to denounce Hawking as a kook.
To read Easterbrook, Stephen Hawking has been getting away with nonsense pronouncements because other scientists are too embarassed to call him on them, perhaps because they feel uncomfortable contradicting a cripple. But now Hawking has confessed, the game is up, and we can now forget we ever heard of black holes.
This of course has nothing to do with the facts of the matter. If you do the math (I have; has Easterbrook?) it is straightforward to see that the ideas about black holes that Hawking propounded thirty-odd years ago were in fact reasonable ones.
Easterbrook clearly hasn't done the math. Brad DeLong catches him out as an almost total ignoramus about gravity. What is gravity? Easterbrook asks. No one has the slightest idea. That gravity exists is indisputable, and the equations by which it functions have been so precisely refined that NASA can guide space probes moving amid the outer planets. But the what of gravity – how it works – is a total unknown. ... Einstein speculated that the mass of every object causes space-time to curve, and then less massive objects roll downward on the curvature, and that's where gravity comes from. But wait, even if space is curved by mass, why do objects roll down the curvature – what pulls them?
Anyone who has taken a class in modern gravity physics would recognize this as the same kind of idiocy as that of those critics of space travel who insisted that rockets can't work in a vacuum because there's nothing to push against. DeLong says, in general relativity objects don't "roll downward" on the curvature. Objects that are not pushed by the strong or the electroweak force move through curved space along that space's "straight lines" – i.e., they follow the shortest distance between any two points – according to the (relativistic version of) Newton's First Law of Motion: a body in uniform motion will continue in uniform motion. That's right: a freely falling object follows a geodesic path in curved spacetime. Matter and energy, in the form of the stress-energy tensor, change the shape of spacetime.
What's more, the equations that NASA's scientists use to guide space probes around the outer planets are Einstein's equations, not Newton's. Newton's theory of gravity isn't good enough for the necessary precision. Einstein's description of curved spacetime does the job. The curvature of spacetime is detectable, observable, measurable.
The only question that remains is this: Why does Marty Peretz give this nutbar Easterbrook the space to peddle such sophmoric twaddle?
(via Eschaton)
Back to School
It's official: Starting next month, I will be a student again, entering the master's degree program in conflict facilitation offered by the Process Work Center of Portland.
It's a three-year program, involving a residency of ten days each semester in Oregon, and work and study at home for the remainder of the semester.
The decision to do this is nowhere near as sudden as this announcement. I've been set on this path for something like a year and a half. I was late with the application, not getting it in until July 1. I received the official notice of acceptance in yesterday's mail.
I'm looking for a very different kind of graduate school experience than my previous one, at Caltech.
August 01, 2004
No-Limit Hold'em Has Legs
I didn't go to Casino San Pablo for the debut of their baby no-limit hold'em game. Instead, I went to the movies with RJ. Afterwards, Debbie picked me up at the Daly City BART station and we went to Lucky Chances to play poker there.
They had four $100-buyin, $1-$1-$2-blind NLHE games. Moments after we got there and put our names on the lists, they called down a fifth game. And what a game! Four earnest young men were the action players – I had the impression that they worked together at some financial firm or other. At length, there must have been $2,500 on the table (this is a $100 maximum buy-in game with nine players).
Back in April I worried about the long-term viability of this game. For now, at least, it's going strong with no sign of slacking.
