British broadcast journalist Jon Snow of TV4 has run a poll to have Britons vote on a modern restatement of the 10 commandments. The new list seems to run to 20 and includes try your best, be honest, be true to yourself, enjoy life, nothing in excess, live within your means, appreciate what you have, never be violent, never kill, be true to your god, enjoy life (sex, drugs, chocolate??) and protect the environment (put the toilet seat down, flush/don’t flush???). Although they sound bland, it isn’t a bad set of moral principles, if we knew what they all really meant. There is a marked underemphasis on worship and fidelity to belief, and some emphasis on being nice. Sweet waffles for principles.
Healing Energy
A story from the Guardian about the practitioners of energy medicine and faith healing questions studies that claim to show this stuff works. The writer treats New Age therapies like Reiki, some forms of Asian traditional medicine, and prayer as different versions of faith healing and that’s a reasonable approach. They all “work” by mysterious mechanisms.
Tour de France – Lance again
BBC Sports reports that Lance Armstrong, now sponsored by the Discovery Channel and riding for Team Discovery Channel (warning: that’s a slow link to a site loaded with adware – I would view it with Firefox and set the adblocker to simplify future visits – but check out the Official Team jersey for $100 US and other merchandise) will compete in the 2005 Tour de France.
We should see TV coverage in Canada which will be entertaining and hopefully inspiring to the lads. The BBC Web sports site has good cycling coverage like this link to the 2004 Tour. Bicycling Magazine has a Tour news site. At this moment, it’s still mainly news from the 2004 Tour, and it hasn’t been updated for a while but it will be worth watching.
Addiction 103
My last entry in this series was about the idea of recovery, and I mentioned AA and 12 step programs. This time I want to talk about treatment. Addicts may take a long time to decide they need help, and when they do, reliable help may be hard to find.
Addiction 102
There is an old joke about the difference between a drunk and an alcoholic. A drunk doesn’t go to meetings.
n. & Treatment
[Originally posted in Rise Again].
I haven’t posted in Rise Again since August. I used to post the news about n. here, but in September 2004 I started to post the news about n. in my public blog, A Sea of Flowers. If n. stays addicted, he will probably not care about my having written about him. If he gets better, he may not want to be reminded about his story, but it won’t hurt him.
I am frustrated with n’s situation. He has been able to bend so many situations to his advantage, and he seems to keep avoiding the consequences of his actions. I have helped to guard him against some of them myself and I have been reading some of my old posts with dismay. I have seen the problem and I have seen how useless I have been at helping n., and how has manipulated me, again and again, but I keep trying to help, and I keep repeating my mistakes.
All the other players in the system keep putting the responsibility for getting n. into drug treatment on him. I keep hearing that no treatment program will have him until he is “ready” but I wonder if that isn’t an excuse to avoid having to work with him. No one seems to want to take hold of n. and work with him. I also keep hearing that the treatment resources for amphetamine addiction are simply not there. I would like to just get him off the street, get him away from the drug and get him working on his own recovery. I can’t do it because I can’t hold him or lock him up, and because he doesn’t keep his promises when he lives with me.
Mid-February
Last Thursday Mike and I went to R.A. Steen to skate on the outdoor ice, and we were drawn into a pickup game of shinny which was a lot of fun, as Mike has written. Like Mike, I confess to being a lousy hockey player. The sudden turns, stops and accelerations challenge my skating skill. The sprints challenged my lungs and my aerobic recovery, and the whole thing challenged some muscles that don’t come into play during cylcing and skiing. On Saturday and Sunday I found that it was painful to cough because my abdominal muscles were sore. But, like Mike I would do it again.
The Thursday night shinny was the first of three or four workouts over the last 4 days. I have skied twice, and I had a workout with a snow-shovel this morning.
New Blogs
Steve has changed servers. His domain name is still the same, and the domain name registry has been configured to redirect users to his new server. Old links seem to work, and my browser is redirected to the new location of his home page and weblog. He reports that he can’t run his own custom blog CMS any more, and he is using DocBook for his blog now. He saved the posts entered under his old CMS and imported them into the newest version of his blog. (Update – February 14/05: Steve has taken down his web page and blog for the time being).
Mike has launched a WordPress blog called Meanderings. His cycling exploits can still be seen in his Cycling Log. The log stopped in November, but a cyclist’s spring is only a few weeks away.
Enough
Over the last two weeks my relationship with n. has been reduced to picking him up, driving him around, buying him a few meals, and buying tobacco, groceries and few other articles to make his life at the Salvation Army a little easier. He has not been able to give up drugs and he is still avoiding drug treatment. He continues to ask me for resources while lying about his addiction and his plans to deal with it. Today (February 8) I told n. that I was not going to keep meeting him and buying things for him while he is avoiding drug treatment. I finished a conversation that we have been having over the last few weeks.
Religions of England
The main BBC Web site home has a lot of links to interesting internal resources. There is a page on Religion and Ethics. There is a box on that page which links to an Index of Religions in Britain The Guardian Online has its own Guide to Religion in the U.K..