Jennifer Rubin is the Washington Post’s designated conservative blogger. Her blog is called “Right Turn.”

She posted a scathing commentary yesterday that expressed her complete disgust with the GOP’s standard-bearer. Republican leaders ran for cover or went silent after Trump’s belittling of the Khan family, the Muslim parents who lost their son in combat in Iraq. His contemptuous comments sounded a lot like his outrageous statement during the campaign that John McCain was no hero, after serving years in a brutal prisoner-of-war camp, because he got caught. Trump, who never served in the military, said that heroes don’t get caught. Apparently, he also thinks that heroes don’t get killed in action saving others.

This is what Jennifer Rubin wrote about this vulgar, ignorant, narcissist and his enablers:

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and vice-presidential nominee Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana (R) knew what…

C-PTSD Awareness
Signs and Symptoms of Chronic Trauma

© Madelyn Griffith-Haynie, CTP, CMC, ACT, MCC, SCAC
from the Self-Health Series

One of the factors of PTSD is that some people seem to have severe cases while others do not — that some soldiers were more vulnerable to extreme trauma and stress than others.

As an explanation for some of these complications it has been suggested and researched that there is a form of PTSD that is called DESNOS [Disorders of Extreme Stress Not Otherwise Specified]. Another term is C-PTSD or Complex-PTSD. ~  Allan Schwartz, LCSW, Ph.D

Relatively Recent Distinction & Debate

Many traumatic events that result in PTSD are of time-delimited duration — for example, short term military combat exposure, rape or other violent crimes, earthquakes and other natural disasters, fire, etc.  However, some individuals experience chronic trauma that continues or repeats for months or years at a time.

The difference between the current Cultural Revolution in the United States and Mao’s in China (1950 – 1976) is that this unique American Revolution is from the top down instead of the bottom up. In China the majority of the people supported the Chinese Communist Party against the Nationalist Party in a Civil War that raged for decades (1927 – 1950).

But in the United States, the revolution is being led by the wealthiest 0.1% of Americans: for instance, Bill Gates, two of the four Koch brothers, the Walton Walmart family, Rupert Murdock, Wall Street, Corporate America, Hedge Funds, recently Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, who was recruited into the Gates Cabal, and a few other poorer billionaires, for instance Eli Broad in California, a billionaire who made his money in real estate and who is currently funding a campaign to take half the children in the public schools in Los Angeles…

After years of endless seductions, the 20th century’s Don Juan Casanova has met the one woman he wants to romance for the rest of his life, but his future is threatened when he becomes the prime suspect in the nightclub murders of his grandfather and younger brother.

P Benson, a top 1,000 Amazon Reviewer said, “I loved this book. The Redemption of Don Juan Casanova was a superb, funny mystery.”

A judge for the 23rd Annual Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards said, “In The Redemption of Don Juan Casanova, we are presented with a contemporary update on an old story told with an interesting spin that gets us to view the original in a new light while helping us to see the world around us in a fresh and interesting way.”

The setting of this novel is based on a night club called the Red Onion in Southern California where…

Today my book “Dynamite and Prayers:Emerald Miners of Afghanistan” officially goes ON SALE in the United States in advance of an exhibit of my photographs during the PhotoNOLA festival in New Orleans, Louisiana at the Second Story Gallery at 2372 St. Claude Avenue from December 10^th to the 13^th, 2015.

Daily we see images of the hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants fleeing war or seeking new lives flooding into Europe. According to the UNHCR more than half of the world’s refugees are from Syria, Afghanistan or Somalia. The Obama administration is making plans to raise the number of refugees accepted in the United States to as high as 100,000 in the coming years, an increase from 70,000 refugees allowed in this year. In Europe, kindness has prevailed for those who have taken these refugees into their homes and fear has spread where people have had…

Chinese history shows that since the time of Qin Shi Huangdi, China’s first emperor (221 – 207 B.C.), the standard practice in war was to execute POWs because they were a burden that might lead to defeat.  An army that doesn’t have to feed and guard POWs is more effective at fighting and winning.  Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan knew this fact too.

Some time ago I watched a documentary on the Korean War that mentioned that 87% of United Nations (U.N.) troops captured by the People’s Liberation Army or North Korean troops during the war died in captivity, but it doesn’t explain how they died.

In fact, while there was strong evidence that North Korean Troops executed U.N. POWs, the Chinese rarely executed prisoners like their North Korean counterparts did. Instead, mass starvation and diseases swept through the Chinese POW camps during the winter of 1950-51. “About 43…

In 1965, China’s Mao Zedong launched a cultural war against the excesses of capitalism, and this was led by the people, the workers and their children, and the capitalists in China and anyone who was accused of supporting the lifestyle of the rich and famous was targeted leading to millions of suicides.

For the last few decades, millions of people in the United States have been victims of its own cultural war, but this one is the reverse of the one that was led by Mao in China. America’s cultural war is being led by a handful of billionaire oligarchs who are transforming American into a money making paradise for those who have the most wealth and power.

This morning I read a piece in the Huffington Post that reported Kansas welfare recipients will be unable to get more than $25 per day in benefits under a new law sent…

We were about to discover that you don’t have to climb Mount Everest to face danger in mountains.

Near the end of the 20th century, two former U.S. Marines, Lloyd (me) and Marshall, decided to climb a mountain they’d conquered many times, but this climb was different, because they had no idea when they started up Mount San Antonio in Los Angeles County’s San Gabriel Mountains that they’d almost freeze, and the harsh wind would work hard to rip them from the mountainside, and Marshal would lose his footing on black ice and slide down a steep slope toward a two-thousand foot vertical drop and almost certain death.

Our goal that Saturday had been to climb to the top of the highest mountain in the San Gabriel Mountains that soared above Los Angeles to a dizzy height of 10,069’. As we climbed, the sky above the mountain was capped with…

How important is a book’s cover? Well, for an answer, The Midwest Book Review rejects books submitted for review if the cover doesn’t measure up to traditional industry standards. Midwest reviewers do not bother to open those books. They go in the recycle bin.

On Saturday, January 10, 2015, I attended the January meeting of the Diablo Branch of the California Writers Club to hear a presentation by Jim Azevedo, the Marketing Director of Smashwords. The title of his presentation was “The Secrets to Ebook Self-Publishing Success”. With a Power Point Presentation that had 72 screen shots, he focused on ten secrets, and the one that grabbed my attention was #2, Creating a SUPBERB cover image.

It was soon obvious to me that a book’s cover was probably one of the most important steps to publishing success after writing a riveting story that is professionally edited, because more than 26%…

Hal Salzman, sociologist and professor of public policy at Rutgers University, says there is a shortage of jobs for graduates who have studied science and engineering. The so-called STEM jobs, he says, have an excess of applicants.

Salzman wrote recently in U.S. News and World Report:

“All credible research finds the same evidence about the STEM workforce: ample supply, stagnant wages and, by industry accounts, thousands of applicants for any advertised job. The real concern should be about the dim employment prospects for our best STEM graduates: The National Institutes of Health, for example, has developed a program to help new biomedical Ph.D.s find alternative careers in the face of “unattractive” job prospects in the field. Opportunities for engineers vary by the field and economic cycle – as oil exploration has increased, so has demand (and salaries) for petroleum engineers, resulting in a near tripling of petroleum engineering graduates. In…