A Gift . . .

The Broad Institute, a biomedical research center, announced a $650 million donation for psychiatric research from the Stanley Family Foundation — one of the largest private gifts ever for scientific research. It comes at a time when basic research into mental illness is woefully inadequate, and many drug makers have all but abandoned the search for new treatments. It's been about 25 years since any major pharmaceutical strides have been made in treating psychiatric disorders. Broad Institute officials hope that Mr. Stanley’s donation will change that, and they timed their announcement to coincide with the publication of the largest analysis to date on the genetics of schizophrenia.

Why did Ted Stanley make such a generous gift? In 1988, his son Jonathan Stanley (a college dropout)  was visiting New York City when he became convinced that government agents were closing in on him. He bolted, and for three days and nights raced through the city streets and subway tunnels. His flight ended in a deli, where he climbed a plastic crate and stripped off his clothes. The police took him to a hospital, and he finally received effective treatment two years after getting a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. “My son’s life was saved,” his father, Ted Stanley, said recently. When he himself was in college, he added, “those drugs didn’t exist; I would have had a non functioning brain all the rest of my life.”
(thanks to http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/22/science/650-million-psychiatric-research.html?_r=0)

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Old? . . .

. . . let's just say long-time . . .

“Old friends are best.”
-John Selden

“A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out.”
-Walter Winchell

“Friends are treasures.”
-Horace Bruns

“Friends are lost by calling often and calling seldom.”
-Proverb

“Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends we choose.”
-Tennessee Williams

“A friend is a gift you give yourself.”
-Robert Louis Stevenson

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OHO's "Ocean City Ditty," the CD single is now available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/oho4
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My latest solo release, '2014', can be downloaded digitally at:

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Give and Take . . .

(from http://www.courant.com/entertainment/hc-winter-history-giftgiving,0,2002289.story)
By 1860, the New York Evening Post said Christmas in New York was an embarrassment of the riches that made holiday shopping more difficult and time-consuming. Most of December was spent preparing and shopping for Christmas.

The ``American,'' a journal published in 1887, asked: ``What is Christmas for? Not to enrich the shopkeepers.'' Instead, the journal argued that Christmas should be a time of worship, reunion and ``old- fashioned sports.''

Even before the 1800s, merchants were encouraging the nation's colonial culture to copy the aristocratic holiday observance of genteel gift-giving.

During the mid-1800s, entrepreneurs seized the opportunity to sell holiday trinkets and gifts in the streets, from carts and stalls. Visionaries of the modern consumer culture, from P.T. Barnum to R.H. Macy, knew how to sell Christmas to the middle-class consumer.

Children, in particular, liked this way of celebrating Christmas. It was around 1840 that children began to hang their stockings by the fireplace, according to the Connecticut Historical Society. About 20 years later, Santa became every child's hero with such 1860 stories as ``The Night Before Christmas.''

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Why . . .

. . . Christmas? . . .

. . . Why not ALWAYS . . .



Christmas gift suggestions:
To your enemy, forgiveness.
To an opponent, tolerance.
To a friend, your heart.
To a customer, service.
To all, charity.
To every child, a good example.
To yourself, respect.
-Oren Arnold

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Christmas. . .

 . . . shmistmas. . .

. . . so now.  It's come and gone.  Sure, sure, we're supposed to keep the Christmas 'spirit' all year round.  But WHO really does.

Who really does anything to help humanity all year round all the time.  Help everyone always no matter if there is a holiday, or a tragedy, or a book or a tradition or a legacy that one is trying to observe.

Well, at least we bought plenty of gifts and distributed them appropriately to everyone we deemed 'giftworthy'. 

What makes them really giftworthy in the first place anyway???

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Do brains come along with fame? . . .

. . . As if it isn't bad enough that a baseball player will now be paid $25 million a year, we are actually taking the advice of people who are merely qualified to hit a ball with a stick or play a guitar and sing a song.

Let me be clear, I respect talent. True talent, be it athletic, intellectual or artistic, is a gift and a wonder and truly a benefit to humankind. But, would you actually hire one of Ringling Brothers' clowns to do your taxes or ask a Hollywood actor to counsel you on your marriage?





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Sunday. . .

. . . seems like an appropriate day to quote everybody's favorite atheist. . .

"That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence."

"[O]wners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are gods."

"Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse."

"Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it."

"[Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction."

"The governor of Texas, who, when asked if the Bible should also be taught in Spanish, replied that 'if English was good enough for Jesus, then it's good enough for me."

"Exceptional claims demand exceptional evidence."

"To "choose" dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid. "

"Organised religion is violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children."

"I suppose that one reason I have always detested religion is its sly tendency to insinuate the idea that the universe is designed with 'you' in mind or, even worse, that there is a divine plan into which one fits whether one knows it or not. This kind of modesty is too arrogant for me."

. . . Christopher Hitchens



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