ellauri055.html on line 98: Victor Serge was appreciative of Rolland's interventions on his behalf but ultimately thoroughly disappointed by Rolland's refusal to break publicly with Stalin and the repressive Soviet regime. The entry for May 4, 1945, a few weeks after Rolland's death, in Serge's Notebooks: 1936-1947 notes acidly that "At age seventy the author of Jean-Christophe allowed himself to be covered with the blood spilled by a tyranny of which he was a faithful adulator."
ellauri063.html on line 41: Tony Blair oversaw British interventions in Kosovo (1999) and Sierra Leone (2000), which were generally perceived as successful. During the War on Terror, he supported the foreign policy of the George W. Bush administration and ensured that the British Armed Forces participated in the War in Afghanistan from 2001 and, more controversially, the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Blair argued that the Saddam Hussein regime possessed an active weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program, but no stockpiles of WMDs or an active WMD program were ever found in Iraq. The Iraq War became increasingly unpopular among the British public, and he was criticised by opponents and (in 2016) the Iraq Inquiry for waging an unjustified and unnecessary invasion. He was in office when the 7/7 bombings took place (2005) and introduced a range of anti-terror legislation. His legacy remains controversial, not least because of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
ellauri080.html on line 558: ASD is a life long disorder and comorbidity needing treatment or interventions can be present during various phases of life.
ellauri100.html on line 321: What does that have to do with my final rejection of “liberalism” and turn toward libertarianism? When government intervenes in economic and social affairs, its interventions are based on crude “measures of effectiveness” (e.g., eliminating poverty and racial discrimination) without considering the intricacies of economic and social interactions. Governmental interventions are — and will always be — blunt instruments, the use of which will have unforeseen, unintended, and strongly negative consequences (e.g., the cycle of dependency on welfare, the inhibition of growth-producing capital investments). I then began to doubt the wisdom of having any more government than is necessary to protect me and my fellow Americans from foreign and domestic predators. My later experiences in the private sector and as a government contractor confirmed my view that professors, politicians, and bureaucrats who presume to interfere in the workings of the economy are naïve, power-hungry, or (usually) both. Oh I hated those M.I.T. professors. So smug, thought they knew everything.
ellauri182.html on line 209: Cross-national epidemiological studies show that prevalence rates of common mental disorders (i.e. depression, anxiety disorders, and post traumatic ressi) vary considerably between countries, suggesting cultural differences. In order to gather evidence on how culture relates to the aetiology and phenomenology of mental disorders, finding meaningful empirical instruments for capturing the latent (i.e. non-visible) construct of 'culture' is vital. In this review, we suggest using value orientations for this purpose. We focus on Schwartz's value theory, which includes two levels of values: cultural and personal. We identified nine studies on personal values and four studies on cultural values and their relationship with common mental disorders. This relationship was assessed among very heterogeneous cultural groups; however, no consistent correlational pattern occurred. The most compelling evidence suggests that the relationship between personal values and mental disorders is moderated by the cultural context. Hence, assessing mere correlations between personal value orientations and self-reported symptoms of psychopathology, without taking into account the cultural context, does not yield meaningful results. This theoretical review reveals important research gaps: Most studies aimed to explain how values relate to the aetiology of mental disorders, whereas the question of phenomenology was largely neglected. Moreover, all included studies used Western instruments for assessing mental disorders, which may not capture culturally-specific phenomena of mental distress. Finding systematic relationships between values and mental disorders may contribute to making more informed hypotheses about how psychopathology is expressed under different cultural circumstances, and how to culturally adapt psychological interventions.
ellauri269.html on line 349: Because it operates in support of Russian interests, receives military equipment from the Russian Ministry of Defence (MoD) and uses installations of MoD for training, Wagner Group is frequently considered a de facto unit of the MoD or Russia's military intelligence agency, the GRU. It is widely speculated that the Wagner Group is used by the Russian government to allow for plausible deniability in certain conflicts, and to obscure from public the number of casualties and financial costs of Russia's foreign interventions. It has played a significant role in the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, where, among other activities, it has been reportedly deployed to assassinate Ukrainian leaders, and has widely recruited prisoners and convicts for frontline combat. In December 2022, Pentagon's John Kirby claimed Wagner group has 50,000 fighters in Ukraine, including 10,000 contractors and 40,000 convicts. Others put the number of recruited prisoners at more like 20,000, with the overall number of PMCs present in Ukraine estimated at 20,000. After years of denying links to the Wagner group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, a businessman with close links to Putin, admitted in September 2022 that he "founded" the paramilitary group. Now (Feb 2023) he is angry because he is not getting all the attention and financial support he wants. He says that the Kreml nomenclature are thereby guilty of high treason. *This article may be too long to read and navigate comfortably, so I stop here.
ellauri389.html on line 190: In 2006, Putin replied to George W. Bush's criticism of Russia's human rights record by stating that he "did not want to head a democracy like Iraq's," referencing the US intervention in Iraq. For example, writing for Slate in 2014, Joshua Keating noted the use of "whataboutism" in a statement on Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea, where Putin, completely irrelevantly, "listed a litany of complaints about Western interventions, including the previous two Crimean wars 1853-56 and 1918-21."
xxx/ellauri122.html on line 170: The mechanisms underlying the benefits of Mindfulness Based Interventions are suggested to include improved emotional regulation strategies and self-compassion levels, decreased rumination and experiential avoidance [3], as well as improved meta-cognitive skills and body awareness [4,5]. A number of authors have suggested models to explain the psychological mechanisms by which mindfulness interventions have an effect [6,7,8], and Hötzel et al. [9] have proposed a theoretical framework that integrates earlier models. This framework proposes that there are four main mechanisms: (1) attention regulation; (2) body awareness; (3) emotion regulation; and (4) change in perspective of the self; these, therefore, together improve self-regulation [9].
xxx/ellauri193.html on line 348: Carlson called the 2020 assassination of Qasem Soleimani a "cold blooded murder". He criticized the "chest-beaters" who promote foreign interventions, and asked, "By the way, if we're still in Afghanistan, 19 years, sad years, later, what makes us think there's a quick way out of Iran? Or Ukraine, If we go there?"
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