When comparing male power to female power, think of the former as action and the latter as attraction. Another way to look at it: doing versus being. The yang and the yin. The light and the dark. The electric and the magnetic.  The push and the pull. The broadcaster and the receiver.

The two forms of power complement each other, but this male-dominated world considers only the male/push/electric form as legitimate. Female/pull/receptive power is derided as seduction or temptation, when it really is the basis for the experiences and people we all attract into our lives. The law of attraction rests on female power, not male. Perhaps that is why it is so poorly understood.

In other words, to act, we use the electric energy of the mental-spiritual half of self. This is the side of self we are most familar with. To attract or receive, we use the magnetic energy of the emotional-physical parts of our being. One side of self cannot do or be without the other, yet we venerate and elevate the mental-spiritual (the masculine) at the expense of the emotional-physical (the feminine).

We also need to understand what we mean by energy here. The energy we speak of is the energy of consciousness — thoughts, feelings, beliefs — known as the aura in metaphysical terms. This consciousness-aura energy is called kura in the Green Stone of Healing® speculative epic. Whatever the name, this energy is the essence of who we are. Even our physical bodies are energy in a form that we are capable of perceiving with our physical eyes. Other names for this energy are chi or prana.

So where does romance fit into this gender-power equation? Interestingly, romance is where the two kinds of energies, masculine and feminine, collide and mingle. That’s what makes romance so compelling and essential, especially to women. During a romance, a woman finally elicits emotional (and sexual) attention from a man who otherwise would ignore his feelings about her or anyone else (himself included) to focus his energies on action, usually competition, in business, sports, or elsewhere.

Men absolutely hate it that they are not immune to women’s attracting/receptive power. This is one of the fascinating dynamics of romance. But they cannot escape this kind of power because they also possess it, although not to the degree that women do, unless the man is gay or bisexual.

Moralizing aside, one of the reasons a non-hetero sexual orientation is so threatening to straight men is the extra degree to which attracting/receptive feminine energy is present in the aura of non-hetero males. Lesbians and bisexual women also possess a greater extent of male/push energy than straight females. This is not as threatening to straight men because they are familiar with this kind of energy and regard it as superior anyway.

To be female in this world has long been associated with powerlessness. Nothing could be further from the truth. Attracting/receptive energy is extremely powerful, but can also be misused easily and degenerate into manipulation.

Throughout the generations, the Green Stone of Healing® saga explores how female power is the missing link for true healing at all levels of self and in the world. It also examines how women’s greatest challenge is to accept their own attracting/receptive nature as legitimate power and wield it forthrightly to sustain their personal autonomy, and improve their own lives and the lives of those they love.

Sometimes we all need to brag a little.

Harriet Klauser, Amazon.com’s No. 1 customer reviewer, gives five stars to Green Stone of Healing® series.

Klausner’s review for each novel is available at its Amazon.com sales page.

The Vision “A superb complex character driven fantasy”
http://tinyurl.com/ylja3b4

 Fallout “a terrific fantasy…fast-paced throughout…”
http://tinyurl.com/ylbqe4o

The Scorpions Strike :”an engaging tale that has a unique feel to the plot…”
http://tinyurl.com/yg4gavn

Outcast “fantasy readers will enjoy this fine entry…”
http://tinyurl.com/yj38bbg

Find out what has this top reviewer so enthralled.

The series is available in paperback at Amazon and other online bookstores, such as BookLocker.com, and as ebooks (.pdf only) through HealingStone Books.

Call it a sign of our polarized times. Even the ground hogs disagree.

According to Reuters, the venerable Punxsutawney Phil predicted six more weeks of winter today when he saw his shadow after coming out of his burrow. Phil has been at this for more than a century, so he has lots of practice.

Upstart rival Staten Island Chuck, however, did not see his shadow, in which case spring is just around the corner.

Of course, the actual groundhogs in question didn’t say a word. That was up to their human handlers. Animals are smart enough to keep their opinions to themselves, while we humans beings tediously blog on and on…

Director James Cameron’s billion-dollar, award-winning blockbuster, Avatar, bears a striking resemblance to Dances with Wolves in its basic plot. White guy from a military background encounters an indigenous population, falls in love, decides their values and way of life are superior to his, and casts his culture aside.

Of course, there are some refinements to Avatar, mostly the over-the-top technical effects that make this film possible and that are woven into the storyline. The white guy, a crippled former Marine named Jake Sully, uses an avatar, a biomechanical fictional being that is genetically engineered to be half human and half Na’vi, the inhabitants of the planet Pandora. With it he is able to walk again, breath air that is poisonous to human beings, and mingle with the natives to learn their ways.

Avatar is paradoxically plentiful and yet insufficient. The bounty consists of the powerful visual punch that this movie packs. There is so much to see in Pandora that the eyes boggle long before even half of the activity registers in the mind. Watching it non-stop on the big screen is downright exhausting. It’s as though the director does not trust his audience to be able to imagine anything for themselves. In that sense, Avatar unintentionally insults viewers even while offering them the most spectacular blend of animation and live action to come out of Hollywood yet.

As to its lack, the film provides frustratingly superficial glimpses of the natives’ beliefs and spiritual practices, squeezed in between all of the action sequences. Even so, that’s a deal too much for certain critics, who slam it as “anti-human” and “anti-American.” The Vatican doesn’t care for the film’s earth-based faith, and still others bash the portrayal of a white man as yet another savior of an indigenous population.

What do they expect? Cameron, who wrote the script as well as directed, is a white male, so he’s stuck with that viewpoint. No doubt those who find fault would be equally censorious had the director tried to make the film from the native viewpoint.

Critics may gnash their teeth all they want over the movie’s politics, but it is wildly popular precisely because of its advocacy, not despite it. As polls continue to show, more and more Americans have abandoned traditional religions to call themselves independent seekers or simply spiritual. There has also been a huge rise in interest in the goddess, or the feminine divine. On top of that, the public is incensed over unpunished Iraq war profiteering, massive corporate fraud that led to the 2008 economic meltdown yet was rewarded with equally gigantic bailouts, and Wall Street’s baleful influence over Congress and the White House.

Avatar reflects and builds on these trends. The Na’vi tribe’s home is on top of a huge deposit of highly valuable ore that a human corporation wants to mine. Sully’s mission is to persuade the tribe to move peacefully, or his corporate masters will have no qualms about using deadly force to clear the members off their land.

Sully soon realizes and tells his superiors that the natives have no interest in anything the human interlopers could offer them. The Na’vi do not live to amass wealth or power. They love the world that sustains them and try to live in harmony with it and with neighboring tribes.

What a tragedy that the preceding is so threatening to so many Americans. If might-makes-right, profits-uber-alles is now the creed of our culture and country, then we are indeed as lost as Sully is when his avatar inadvertently spends its first night alone outside in Pandora.

This film is also a hit worldwide. In the greedy ore-grubbers, who don’t care who they kill or what they destroy in their profits quest, others clearly recognize the proverbial ugly American. If we also see it and don’t like it, then there’s little point in blaming the mirror, which in this case is a movie called Avatar.

Maybe it’s time to address what causes such a revolting reflection in the first place.

“When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”

If Nobel Prize winning author Sinclair Lewis were alive today, he would have to rework his statement. A timely version might read, “When fascism comes to America, it will smile and wink like Sarah Palin and carry a cross.”

The book’s name is similar to the title of Palin’s recently published autobiography. But their monikers and their main topic are the only things the two have in common. Unlike Going Rogue, Going Rouge is a compendium of essays and columns that thoroughly and often wittily skewer the former Republican vice presidential candidate and ex-governor of Alaska. The authors form a roster of well-known leftwing and progressive commentators.

Many of the pieces were written in the heat of the 2008 presidential campaign once John McCain tapped Palin as his running mate. A few were published after the GOP election debacle. Although the editors group the essays under varying themes, it gives readers whiplash to move back and forth between the before-after perspectives. A chronological ordering of the work might have been easier to digest.

One of the most powerful parts of the book is the brief compendium of Palin criticisms from conservative pundits. And there is also a good deal of angst from women who worry that Palin’s stark deficiencies in experience and understanding of complex issues set back the cause of serious female candidates for high office.

“Palin won’t bust through the ceiling that has Hillary [Clinton]’s 18 million cracks in it,” writes Slate columnist Emily Bazelon. “She’ll give men an excuse to replace it with a new one.”

While there are many pithy, cogent observations about Palin, most of the contributors do not seem to understand the deeper significance of what they are analyzing. Typical is New York Times columnist Frank Rich, who writes that Palin “puts a happy, sexy face on ugly emotions.”

What Palin truly represents is a sexy, winking stalking horse for a twisted version of Christianity every bit as radical and destructive as Muslim extremism. Adherents of this militant Christianity, known as the New Apostolic Reformation, scheme to remake the United States as a Christian theocracy, and have enlisted significant swaths of the U.S. military in their cause. They want power and control every bit as much as bin Laden and his followers, who dream of imposing a new Muslim Caliphate over the entire Middle East and do not shy away from violence to achieve their ends. Neither do Christian militants.

Not even Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family, an expose of how right-wing politics and politicians are financed on a global scale, connects the dots. Instead, his column compares Palin to Westbrook Pegler, an ultra conservative commentator masquerading as a populist in the early 20^th century.

The omission is perhaps the editors’ doing, not Sharlet’s. If there’s one thing left-wing punditry shy away from, it’s examining core religious beliefs. That’s very uncomfortable territory for them.

It’s a shame. The editors of and contributors to Going Rouge might want to spend time reading the knowledgeable researchers at websites like Talk2Action.  Bruce Wilson, the site’s founder, and his colleagues understand exactly what Palin really represents, possibly because they are also people of faith. They are doing their best to alert the rest of us to the true perils of Palin’s rise to political prominence before it is too late.

Gives this book 3.5 stars out of 5.

The Huffington Post’s Arianna Huffington struck a nerve in the American public when she suggested on Dec. 29 that we take our money out of banks that are “too big to fail” and put it into community banks or credit unions.

In other words, vote with our pocketbooks against the venal, corrupt institutions that caused the U.S. economy to crater and were rewarded with billions in taxpayer bailout dollars to save them from the consequences of their short-sighted greed and folly.

Welcome aboard, Ms. Huffington. We walked away more than a decade ago. We have two checking/savings accounts. One is with the Fort Worth City Credit Union, which my partner can use because her grandfather was a Fort Worth city employee for decades. We opened that account back in 1989.

A decade later, we moved our second account from Bank of America to a credit union serving residents of our small Texas town just south of Dallas. It was a minor pain in the keister to move the money. The satisfaction of blowing off BofA was priceless.

The BofA account did not start out at BofA. It began in 1981 at First National Bank, a Texas-based institution that, like most large Texas banks at the time, served consumers as an afterthought but really cherished commercial business. Then the 1986 oil crunch hit, and FNB became First Republic, merging with its statewide rival in a desperate bid by both parties to remain solvent.

The years passed. We watched as a larger regional player stepped in to acquire InterFirst before it swooned into bankruptcy. That regional powerhpouse was, in turn, snapped up by BofA. Along the way, customer service evaporated, fees for everything exploded, and we finally cried, “Enough!” and left in sheer disgust.

That was at the height of the 1990s dotcom boom.

We have never looked back. The service is great at both of our credit unions, and the one in our town, which deals with us on a day-to-day basis, knows our names, and refuses to deliver check refills to our home out of concern about identity theft. (Instead, the CU has the checks delivered there and calls us to come get them.)

Any money we subsequently earn will go into credit unions or small local banks. Once we pay off our credit cards, we will look hard at how to ditch plastic, too, and go all cash.

BofA never noticed or cared about losing our meager dollars. But if thousands and maybe millions of us make the effort to walk away, it will hit the big boys in the only place they can feel–their pocketbooks.

Evidence of a conspiracy to assassinate President John F.  Kennedy has always been right in front of our eyes.

One glaring immediate example: the behavior of the Secret Service agent driving the limousine in which were riding the president and Mrs. Kennedy along with Texas Gov. John Connally and his wife, Nellie. It was incompetent at the very best and more likely part of the death plan.

Every existing film of the motorcade shows that when the first bullet rang out, the vehicle unaccountably slows down and almost stops. Why? There was an obvious threat to the president’s safety; mere seconds could mean the difference between life and death.

Proper action to protect the president would have been to floor the accelerator and zoom toward the freeway entrance straight ahead, on the other side of a tunnel. (I have driven this route numerous times during my 28+ years as a Dallas area resident.)

Instead, the limousine strangely crawls along while more shots are fired. Then it finally speeds up, after it is too late. Again, why the deadly delay?

“In Dallas, the Secret Service would step out of the way not just individually, but collectively,” James W. Douglass writes in JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (Orbis Books, 2008).

Another odd aspect to the aftermath of the JFK murder. How did the authorities come up with a named suspect within 20 minutes of the president’s death? After the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, it took a nationwide search involving almost every law enforcement agent in the country two days to produce the same results.

The almost instaneous speed at which a suspect in the JFK killing emerged screams not only that the assassination was a conspiracy, but that those who conspired had high-level law enforcement connections. Lee Harvey Oswald spoke the truth before he, too, was murdered. He was a patsy.

One of the most interesting parts of Douglass’s unique account of the events leading up to and beyond Nov. 22, 1963 in Dallas is his take on Abraham W. Bolden, whom Kennedy appointed to be the first African-American member of the Secret Service’s White House detail.

At the 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Bolden saw the open hostility of Secret Service agents toward Kennedy. He soon asked to be sent back to the Chicago field office. After Kennedy’s death, Bolden returned to Washington, D.C., for job training. He tried to contact the Warren Commission to tell members about a Chicago-based attempt to kill Kennedy that failed when the president’s trip to the Windy City was canceled at the last minute.

For his efforts, Bolden was arrested and charged with soliciting money to commit fraud, obstructing justice, and conspiracy. The first jury deadlocked; a second one convicted him on all three counts.

Later, in a trial before the same judge, the forger charged in the case admitted to perjury when fingering Bolden on the witness stand during Bolden’s trial. Yet Bolden was not released or re-tried, instead serving more than half of a six-year prison sentence. His wife and family survived several mysterious attempts to kill them.

Bolden, who died some years ago without ever having the chacen to clear his name, and his loved ones are among the many who paid dearly for their efforts to bring the truth about the JFK plot to light.

Douglass’s book is one of the finest of many efforts to make sense of this killing, which in reality was a coup d’etat that took place 46 years ago to this day

“Physician, heal thyself.”

–Luke 4:23

Now that healthcare employers take disruptive workplace behavior seriously, and a major survey has indicated that physicians cause the majority of it, what are they doing to change the situation?

According to Dr. Barry Silbaugh, CEO of the American College of Physician Executives (ACPE), one effective method is based on the engineering concept of high reliability. “This sticks more with doctors because they think like engineers,” he says.

“There is a fair amount of overlap between disruptive behavior and medical malpractice,” Silbaugh says, although he knows of no studies examining the exact relationship.

With lives and health on the line, the healthcare field is following the aviation industry, which several decades ago brought in the principles of high reliability to improve behavior among pilots and crew in airplanes, where lives are also at stake.

The ACPE works with physicians all around the country, teaching them how high reliability applies to the practice of their profession. “We try to emphasize the knowledge and behavior competencies needed by physician leaders,” he says.

The most dangerous time for patients is when they are transferred from one department to another, such as the operating room to intensive care, Silbaugh says.  “Doctors need to learn how to behave and influence people,” he adds. “They must let go of autonomy and become part of a team” that feels free to ask questions about patients and their care without fearing attacks or reprisals.

Another huge issue for physicians is admitting that they are not perfect, that they will make mistakes. In addition, Silbaugh notes, the obsessive-compulsive behaviors that may have helped them through medical school start to work against doctors in the real world of actual medical practice.

“Medical schools use too much humiliation as part of their training,” Silbaugh adds. He says that when he speaks to doctors, he talks about the baggage they carry with them, and always cites poet Maya Angelou, who writes that people never forget how we make them feel. Amen to that.

The real issue, however, goes beyond behavior, which is visible and measurable, and is therefore usually the focus of improvement efforts. Behavior, in its turn, arises out of our feelings about self and our beliefs. The baggage, in other words.

Doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals dishing out disruptive, possibly criminal behavior do so out of low self-esteem. They feel bad about themselves and are insecure, and take it out on those around them. They also play politics, jockeying for position and recognition. All at the expense of patients and colleagues.

How do we heal feelings? How do we even find them within ourselves to address them? The low self-esteem and insecurities that prompt disruptive behavior are often not available to our conscious awareness. We cannot fathom why we act the way we do. It just comes out and blindsides us as well as those around us.

The irony of medicine today is that having devolved into a science devoted strictly to the physical, there is little accounting for the mental part of self, and no place at all for the emotional and spiritual aspects of our being.

Yet if physicians (and the rest of us) are ever truly to heal themselves or their patients, they/we must finally include the overlooked parts of self that cry out for succor. The emotional and spiritual are just as real and valid as the physical and mental sides of self, or our behavior. Feelings and beliefs are powerful and important.

Yet medical science ignores and leaves behind this entire half of self, rendering healthcare incomplete and ever more costly as a result.

“It’s never gone away, the nightmare of November 22, 1963,” a recent article in Vanity Fair laments. Yet the writer dutifully toes the line, insisting that the official explanation about the murder of President John F. Kennedy 46 years ago is correct.

Ahem. One of the major reasons the nightmare continues is because the official explanation is a tissue of lies and distortions. The 1964 Warren Report, thrown together to appease the public, instead unleashed a torrent of critical books, documentaries, and movies that is unabated close to five decades later. This onslaught was entirely predictable. For every action (the grotesque cover-up), there is an equal and opposite reaction (numerous attempts, however misguided, to set the record straight).

The nightmare goes on because we the people have never learned the truth about what happened in Dallas, and we know this, in our heart of hearts. The profound wrong of Kennedy’s death was compounded tenfold by the fact that the guilty got away not just with murdering one individual, but with undoing the U.S. Constitution and overthrowing the people’s will.

In his 2008 seminal work, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters, James W. Douglass calls it the “unspeakable,” these un-exorcised national demons driving Kennedy’s murder. In examining the motives behind the death of the president, not merely who did it or the how, Douglass, a longtime peace activist, imbues the discussion with a long-missing, much-needed spiritual dimension.

Douglass’s “unspeakable” refers to so much more than merely the identities of who pulled the triggers or even the ones who hired them to do so. Part of the “unspeakable” is the sharp divergence between the high ideals of this country’s founding and our current national security state, established in the aftermath of World War II, that promotes endless war and profits from it.

It is this untreated, denied poison that, Douglass argues, corrodes the national soul and breaks out like violent boils every so often in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and, on Sept. 11, 2001, in New York City and Washington, D.C., and over the skies of Pennsylvania. Unafraid of the unspeakable, the author poses the unframed and unspoken question: Can the United States be a global empire that spends more on its military each year than all other western, industrialized nations combined, yet remain a representative democracy?

The signs are not promising. The parallels between now and Kennedy’s day make Douglass’s book about the past all the more critical to the present. Just as Kennedy stared down his generals, President Barack Obama faces truculent military leaders determined to force his hand in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

According to the Durham Herald Sun, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh recently told an audience at Duke University that the U.S. military “is in a war against the White House – and they feel they have Obama boxed in.” While Hersh may be accurate in citing racism behind the tension between today’s commander in chief and the Pentagon, the real issue is the unspeakable. Just what kind of country do we want to be anyway?

This issue goes to the very soul of this nation, and this tension has existed since before this country was born. Do we keep shedding blood for profit? Or do we beat our swords into ploughshares and make peace the cornerstone of all our national policies? The political founders of our nation were divided over whether or not to risk foreign entanglements, but from the outset U.S. business leaders saw no problem in using the power and money of the U.S. government to advance their narrow interests.

To date, business has had the upper hand, masking a profits-at-all-costs agenda behind an anti-terrorism (previously, anti-communism) smokescreen. After the implosions of Chrysler, Enron, Global Crossing, GM, and Worldcom, the massive Bernie Madoff and other investment fraud, and the Wall Street meltdown, however, it’s a little harder to pretend that business is better run or more effective than government.

How long will ordinary Americans remain silent about the unspeakable before they start roaring out loud and then, en masse, revolt?

These medical “professionals” relegate notorious TV physician Gregory House to strictly amateur standing.

A recently published survey of more than 2,100 U.S. physicians and nurses reveals that almost 98 percent of them have witnessed serious incidences of unprofessional conduct that crosses into criminal behavior while on the job in hospitals and other healthcare workplaces.

The kinds of actions cited are not merely the snide remarks that the fictional House directs at colleagues, friends, patients, and other unsuspecting targets. The abysmal conduct includes groping a radiology technician while she was taking an X-ray. A nurse spreading false rumors about a new physician to get him fired or disciplined. One enraged surgeon tossing surgical instruments about an operating room and another shoving a nurse into a trash bin head first. A different physician telling a nurse, “You don’t look dumber than my dog. Why can’t you at least fetch what I need?”

The most common grievance from the survey: degrading comments and insults, which nearly 85 percent of participants reported they had experienced at their organization. Other frequent complaints included yelling, cursing, inappropriate joking, and refusing to work with one another.

Most of the survey participants (67.2 percent) were nurses, and 32.8 percent were doctors. While there were reports of bad behavior among nurses, most respondents, nurses and doctors, cited physicians as the primary source of the problem. While most (56.5 percent) said the incidences occurred either monthly or several times a year, 30 percent said they occur weekly and 9.5 percent reported witnessing problem behavior daily. In other words, more than one-third of surveyed healthcare professionals encounter poor behavior as a regular part of their workday.

This disruptive behavior negatively impacts patient safety and saps workforce morale, according to Dr. Barry Silbaugh, CEO of the American College of Physician Executives (ACPE), which conducted the survey. “It’s nothing new,” Silbaugh says about the conduct brought to light by the poll.

Indeed, anyone who has family or friends in the healthcare field has heard plenty of similar horror stories. I attended college with a registered nurse who graduated from the last nursing diploma class admitted to the profession. She was back in school to obtain the four-year degree that had been just been established as a requirement to become a nurse. It was the early 1970s.

My college classmate often regaled me with toe-curling tales about how she spent much of her time on the job trying to keep interns and residents from harming patients because of their inexperience and/or arrogance. Her view was confirmed by a good friend from later in life who is also a registered nurse and reported much the same situation. Both women are no longer working as nurses, which is hardly surprising.

Then there is the report from the hospital trenches about a different surgeon well known among his colleagues for temper tantrums. One time during a procedure he threw a scalpel. The sharp knife hit something and ricocheted back at him, slicing into his palm and ending his career in the operating room. Instant karma?

While the situation has festered for decades, it has taken on fresh urgency for several reasons, Silbough explains. The first is the current national emphasis on healthcare reform. Despite notable improvements at certain organizations, he says, the majority of healthcare systems still struggle with disruptive behaviors by doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals.

Another reason for renewed interest in solving the problem is a requirement instituted at the start of 2009 by the Joint Commission, the most highly regarded medical accreditation organization. Hospitals and other healthcare facilities must now show a written code of professional conduct to earn Joint Commission safety accreditation.

According to those who replied to the questionnaire, the fundamental issue behind much of the behavior problem is lack of respect between doctors and nurses. And there is good news in all of this. Members of the profession and professional groups like the ACPE are finally starting to talk openly about the problem and address it, instead of keeping it as healthcare’s dirty little secret. And there are actions that members of the healthcare field can take to reduce the problem.