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Chris Harrison on The Bachelor: 'Essentially, Juan Pablo Was Dumped'
The Bachelor host talks about Sharleen's exit and the difficulties Juan Pablo faces as the show nears its season finale
This week, The Bachelor fans can expect double the episodes and more than double the drama, according to host Chris Harrison, who spoke with PEOPLE Wednesday.
Juan Pablo met the families of the four remaining ladies on Monday night's hometown dates edition. Then on Tuesday, the final three travel to St. Lucia for the exotic overnight dates.
Harrison wouldn't describe either experience as "smooth sailing" for our lover with a language barrier.
How does this season compare to others in terms of the final weeks?
The last three weeks were as difficult as we've ever had on this show. Maybe the most difficult. And I don't mean his final choice or how it ends up. I mean this was a rockier road to that final episode than we've ever had. At this point, it's [usually] the bachelor trying to narrow it down to two or three amazing people and then trying to figure out, 'Who fits best in my lifestyle?'
Why do you think that is?
I think he has a tough time letting go, really opening up and giving himself to this process. Yes, it is a television show, and we are creating something entertaining, but it works. You have to believe. Juan Pablo has had a really tough time with that and the women have felt that.
I don't know if it is a cultural difference and a language barrier. He didn't know the show as well as people who have been watching it for 10 years and could just slide easily into that role. I think it made some of them question his motives and if he is here for true love because they are not seeing and hearing it as much as they have in the past.
How jarring was it for him to have Sharleen leave this late in the game?
Essentially, he was dumped. That hurts your ego and confidence. Suddenly all those insecurities – 'Are they all going to leave? Do they really love me? Where is this going?' – come to the surface and make you question everything. He's only human. It rocks the foundation. We've all fallen for that person that didn't fall for us.
He goes all protective father and tries to fix everything. You can see this wall come up. It's very much a defense mechanism to take himself and his own emotions out of it. Later, he gets upset and allows himself to cry. You could see that it did shake his confidence.
Would she have been in the final two and why do you think she left?
I think she was heading that direction. There were still a lot of hurdles to clear – hometowns and overnights – but she was a favorite from the night she got out of the limo. While Juan Pablo does hold the roses, that doesn't mean these women are just doe-eyed followers that do as he says.
Sharleen is an amazingly smart, articulate woman who expects a lot out of a man. She wasn't getting that in her opinion. It happens again next week. One of these woman will question whether this is right for her and if she is getting what she needs out of this relationship.
Tease next week's episodes
[It] isn't such smooth sailing for [Juan Pablo] when he goes into these homes vying for permission from these parents to possibly marry their daughter. These women have lived through the experience, but families go, 'We don't know this guy. You are suddenly in love with him and ready to give up your life.' They're not so quick to give up their blessing. They aren't all contentious but there are contentious parts of at least a couple of them for sure. You'll see by the end of the episode if they fall for him.
The exotic dates episode is probably the most pivotal we've had this season. It's a shakeup of the foundation of everything going on. It's usually the bachelor figuring things out, but this season it has been the ladies questioning and figuring and that will continue through the overnight dates. There are some ugly cries and emotional moments ahead. The people left are 100 percent into this and there's a lot on the line.
Chelsie was really the last goodbye that wasn't really about her as much as it was about the whole process of having to say goodbye. From here on out, it is very personal. Families are involved and love and life is really on the line. It is huge and I hate to use the word, but it's dramatic.
Was letting Chelsie go the right decision?
I don't think he had that connection with Chelsie. They were like good friends. But even if you know it's right, it's still never fun or easy to say goodbye. He takes it really personal, is an emotional guy who wears his heart on his sleeve and Chelsie was really popular in the house so it was a tough situation. [That's why] he pulled the half-Mesnick on the railing.
Is it a failure if there's no proposal?
No, it's life. I love that our show doesn't always end in a proposal. The odd and scary-as-hell thing about producing this show is that we have no say in how it ends. We are going to show you the good, the bad and the ugly.
Is there validity to the criticisms Clare makes against Nikki and vice versa?
Those two are the frontrunners and are getting the most attention and affection with Juan Pablo. It is only human nature to go after those two and find something wrong. The funny thing is Nikki and Clare are more similar than they'd actually care to admit.
What does he see in Renee?
Juan Pablo has a love of family. Renee has that as well. Juan Pablo sees a lot of himself in Renee. He has a lot of respect for her and obviously she's beautiful. Renee has all the qualities that he eventually wants in a wife and family, but is that what he wants right now? It gets down to lifestyle, 'Is this the person who will fits my life right now?'
Is he pleased with the outcome?
At the end of the day, he did a great job for him and he'll be satisfied with where he is in his life.


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Reversible London Check and Leather Belt
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[Kohphangan hotels]
中 文
日 本
West Coast Beach Resort
59/7 Moo 8, Koh Phangan
Koh Phangan, Suratthani 84280
Haad Gruad
Hotel category:
Traveler ratings
Summary of 7 reviews :
Room :
Facilities :
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Location :
West Coast Beach Resort. is located on a beautiful private beach on the north-west coast of Koh Pha-Ngan . This resort has a very relaxed family atmosphere where you can feel like you're at home. The resort has a wide variety of bungalows to suit all needs and budgets. Some rooms are located by the beach, others are surrounded by a lush garden and most have sea view. All rooms have a private balcony and bathroom, hot shower and fan or air-conditioning. The Pool Villa contains 4 superior rooms: these rooms have air-conditioning and fan, balcony, bathroom with hot shower and windows with a great view over the sea and the luscious gardens. The Deluxe Bungalow Air-Con modern style provide air-conditioning, balcony, bathroom with hot shower and fantastic sea view. The resorts facilities & services include a restaurant, travel desk, motorbike for rent, laundry, swimming pool, Taxi, free Wi-Fi, internet corner and money exchange.
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Travel reviews for West Coast Beach Resort
Date of stay:
Aug 12, 2016
Accommodation and facilities:
Hôtel un peu isolé. On ne peut pas se baigner à la plage privée de l hôtel sauf à prévoir des chaussures mais peu de profondeur. Il faut savoir que les bungalows standard avec air conditionné sont très basics : pas de quoi ranger les vêtements ni les accrocher, pas de produits dans la salle de bain, de frigo ni bouteille d eau. A 10 minutes à pied de la baie de Haad salad qui est très jolie. Belle piscine avec vue sur mer. Il ne faut pas craindre les petites bêtes qui se faufilent dans les bungalows. Jardins très bien entretenus et logements à l ombre.
Reservation service:
Aug 17, 2016
written by:
Date of stay:
Oct 08, 2015
Accommodation and facilities:
4 days in total peace and quiet! Staff were amazing, food was great, room was lovely. Fell in love with Lucy their kind and gentile dog who kept us company every day. Beach is private with no passers by, not amazing as sand a bit dirty but it was low season and nicer beaches are very close by. Very good pool. Generally a very good experience overall!
Reservation service:
Always happy to book with you :) I like more then bigger companies.
Oct 11, 2015
written by:
Date of stay:
Mar 07, 2015
Accommodation and facilities:
Nice little coral beach and pool, we had tripple ac room it was basic
Reservation service:
Mar 15, 2015
written by:
Peter Alriksson
Date of stay:
Feb 25, 2015
Accommodation and facilities:
Le site est reposant et agréable. Belle plage de sable fin et piscine propre. Le boss vous facilite le transfert vers le port et la location des scooters. L accés au resort est facile et le chemin de terre ne nous a posé aucun souci avec les scooters. Le restaurant est satisfaisant mais cher.
Reservation service:
Mar 08, 2015
written by:
Genovese Jean Louis
Date of stay:
Feb 03, 2015
Accommodation and facilities:
Reservation service:
money/quality, good price
Feb 07, 2015
written by:
Moios Catalin
Date of stay:
Jan 09, 2014
Accommodation and facilities:
We ve stayed with my friends in Haad Gruad resort in the beginning of January, and we really enjoyed it there! The atmosphere reminds of decorations from the movies with Jackie Chan :) The personnel was great, friendly and the cuisine was great as well. Most of all I liked their guest Tim from England who stayed there at the same time.. Tim was creating a special atmosphere in the bar at evenings - thank you dear! :) By the way the bar is run by a nice man from Australia and he is also very very nice. I forgot my charger for iPhone 5 there in the bar and I will send my friends to pick it up and send to me! Thank you again and I wish a prosperous year to Haad Gruad and all your great team and of course nice and cute guests in the future!!!
Reservation service:
Jan 28, 2014
written by:
Date of stay:
Jan 06, 2014
Accommodation and facilities:
Esta algo retirado de todo,pero es un buen hotel,limpio y agradable,la cocina muy buena como su servicio.
Reservation service:
Sin problemas
Jan 09, 2014
written by:
enrique daniel
THB ฿ Thailand
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West Coast Beach Resort
is a bungalow resort, located on a beautiful private beach on the north west coast of Koh Pha Ngan island in the southern Gulf of Thailand. This resort has a very relaxed family atmosphere where you can feel like you're at home. It is an inexpensive place to stay with the amenities of a luxury resort.
West Coast Beach Resort
has a wide variety of bungalows to suit all needs and budgets. Some rooms are located by the beach, others are surrounded by a lush garden. Most rooms have sea view. All room have a private balcony and bathroom, cold or hot shower and fan or air conditioning. The Pool Villa contains our 4 superior rooms: these rooms have air conditioning and fan and panorama windows with a great view over the sea and our luscious gardens. All rooms have a balcony and bathroom with hot shower. They also have a connecting door, so they can be used as a family apartment.
:: Standard Bungalow A/C - 1 Unit ::
1 King size bed, air con.
:: Deluxe Room - 4 Units ::
4 Units / 1 double bed, air con, balcony and hot water.
:: Deluxe Bungalow A/C - 4 Units ::
4 Units / 1 double bed, air con, balcony and hot water.
:: Family Bungalow A/C - 1 Unit ::
Max stay 4 persons. 2 beds (2D), balcony and hot water
West Coast Beach Resort
is located on a private beach. In the resort you can also find a beach front infinity swimming pool with sun deck, beautiful gardens and a large open air common area for your entertainment.
Internet access is important for many travelers. Free Wi-Fi is a huge selling point, too!
This information is especially important for those traveling to your property by car.
Some guests like to travel with their furry friends. Indicate if you allow pets and if any charges apply.
In the common area there is a restaurant with in door and out door seating. It has a large menu with Thai and International dishes for your breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Other facilities in the common area are:
Projector satellite TV. and music
Internet, scanner and print facilities
Travel desk for boat, bus, train and plane tickets
Small minimart
Motorbike rental
Snorkeling equipment
Laundry service
Safety box
Overseas calling
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[Kohphangan hotels]
[West Coast Beach Resort ]
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For some people new to fitness nutrition lingo, trying to figure out what BCAAs is referring to may be just as difficult as trying to understand millennial abbreviations like LMAO, FOMO, and ROFL mean.
Or maybe you already know what BCAAs are, but you don't know if you really need to include them in your fitness routine.
I'm here to tell you, you need them.
I mean, there are so many benefits of BCAAs that I don't know why you wouldn't want them.
What are those benefits? I'll go into more detail in this article, but here are a few to spark your interest:
- Recover from workouts faster
- Lose fat, NOT muscle
- Improve performance
Interested yet?
Keep reading to learn the science behind branched chain amino acids, and to find the best deal on our number one recommended brand!
What are BCAAs?
BCAAs, or branched-chain amino acids, are actually way more simple than they may sound.
BCAAs consist of three different types of amino acids that are especially important for muscle growth and recovery. These three amino acids are Leucine, Isoleucine, and Valine.
Branched chain amino acids are mostly found in meat and eggs but the easiest way to get them is in supplement form.
What do BCAAs do?
To understand what BCAAs do, we are going to take a detailed look at each specific amino acid to see how each one benefits you.
Leucine is the MVP, the lead singer, the big deal of branched chain amino acids. This amino has the greatest influence on muscle growth and recovery.
Why is this important?
When you workout out as a lifter, swimmer, rock climber, or anything in between, you create tiny tears in your muscle fibers.
These tiny tears can often cause soreness, scientifically referred to as DOMS. (There I go again, throwing in another acronym for you to debunk.)
DOMS stands for delayed onset muscle soreness, or in simple terms, your muscles hurt and moving can be a struggle.
DOMS can occur 12-24 hours after physical activity and leaves you feeling stiff, achy, and makes squatting to use the toilet surprisingly difficult.
For some, that sore feeling may seem like an accomplishment, but for those who want or need to workout on a daily basis, it can be a downright nuisance.
So how do you avoid DOMS and limping around like you've been mortally wounded?
One way is to Include a BCAAs supplement! The Leucine will help prevent major muscle damage and assist your body to recover faster.
This branched chain amino acid is going to be your new best friend during workouts.
Isoleucine increases your body's capacity to use glucose, especially during activity.
This means you'll have more energy for your workouts and the glucose (carbs) you eat will be more efficiently used rather than stored as extra padding for your behind.
When you consume carbohydrates, two things can occur: the sugars are either used as energy, reserved in glycogen stores, or stored as fat.
Most of us have enough fat on our bodies and don't need anymore. This is why Isoleucine and branched chain amino acids are helpful. Isoleucine helps regulate blood sugars, preventing harmful insulin spikes and drops.
Valine has similar properties as Isoleucine and Leucine and works best when combined with them.
Valine, like Leucine, helps your body recover and stimulates muscle growth. Like Isoleucine, valine helps with the uptake and usage of glucose and it may play an important role in muscle coordination and brain function.
Why Use Branched Chain Amino Acids?
I've already mentioned some of the benefits of BCAAs, but that was only scratching the surface.
Here are four more impressive benefits of BCAAs:
1.You'll recover faster.
One study found that branched chain amino acids reduced muscle damage. Another study found those who took a BCAAs supplement before and after a strenuous workout had faster recovery times.
This means you will be able to workout more often at higher intensities while avoiding possible muscle soreness and risk of injury. How many times have you skipped a workout because you were, "too sore"?
More training and less muscle fatigue will mean greater gains in strength and endurance.
2. You'll lose fat, not muscle.
Research has shown that those who include a BCAAs supplement are more likely to lose unwanted fat while keeping lean body mass.
Many times when people are trying to build muscle and lose fat, they actually lose both. Additionally, beginning in your 30s, you actually begin to lose lean muscle and usually replace it with fat. A natural yet unfortunate process called sarcopenia.
By being physically active, including some kind of strength routine, and including the right kinds of supplements (like BCAAs) you can reduce muscle loss over time.
Branched chain amino acids can also help with muscle retention, keeping you lean and active as you age. How?
By keeping your muscles properly fueled with amino acids from BCAAs, you spare muscle tissue.
Muscle tissue can and is used for energy by the body, especially when calories are restricted and during endurance sports like marathons. Reduce muscle loss with a BCAA supplement!
3. You'll improve performance.
A study conducted back in the 90s found, "that both mental and physical performance was improved by an intake of BCAA during exercise."
This is because when amino acids are used for energy, your body prefers to use the amino acids valine, leucine, and isoleucine (aka BCAAs).
Understanding what each of the three BCAAs do, and considering that all amino acids are responsible for every important function in your body, these types of conclusions seem obvious.
If you've been doing any kind of sport or physical activity long, you know that it is just as much a mental game as well as physical.
Branched chain amino acids can help boost your mental capacity and keep you in top physical condition to perform your best.
4. They are effective and convenient.
You now know that branched chain amino acids are extremely important, but why supplement them? Why not just eat them naturally in your food?
I'm all about getting my nutrition through my food whenever possible, but for most people getting all the essential nutrients we need naturally in the diet can be difficult.
I'm not saying it can't be done, but I am saying that supplements can make life much easier.
For example, you would have to eat 4 whole eggs to get the same amount of BCAAs that you could get in one calorie free powder scoop of BCAAs.
If you're aiming for the recommended 5g of BCAAs before and after a workout, that's 8 eggs and 560 calories to get 10g of branched chain amino acids that you could get for zero calories.
Besides supplementing being a simple way to get the needed protein and BCAAs in the diet, the powdered form of BCAAs is digested and absorbed quickly by the body.
The BCAAs found naturally in foods such as eggs and beef, take much longer to digest and cannot be immediately used by the body.
When Do You Take BCAAs?
Generally, before and after a workout take one serving or 5-10g of Branched chain amino acids. These are the times when your body most needs amino acids.
Others find it helpful to sip on their BCAAs drink during their workout for added energy and hydration.
Those looking to preserve muscle mass may take a serving of branched chain amino acids in the morning.
When you wake up, your body is in a fasted state. Since you haven't eaten all night long, you are probably burning muscle as a source of energy.
This is bad news if you want to preserve that hard earned lean mass! Taking BCAAs in the morning with a healthy protein filled breakfast can end this muscle breakdown and give you an energy boost to start your day.
What Brand of BCAAs are the Best?
Our number one, go to brand of BCAAs is IdealLean.
Not only does IdealLean BCAAs have the ideal amount and ratio of amino acids, but they also include a fat loss blend unique from any other brand on the market.
Here is what you will find in IdealLean BCAAs:
- An optimal ratio of 2:1:1
This means there is slightly more grams of Leucine than Isoleucine, and Valine. Research supports that Leucine is the most important of the three BCAAs and that this ratio is best for performance and recovery.
- Green tea and CLA
Green tea has been shown in several studies to increase fat burning and to aid in physical performance. CLA is an omega 6 fatty acid. Some studies have found it has a positive effect on weight loss and improves body composition.
- Coconut powder
Coconut is one of the most hydrating substances in the world and can help improve workouts.
- Additional amino acids L-Citrulline and L-Glutamine
L-Citrulline is known for its sports performance properties and L-Glutamine may help increase lean muscle mass.
- Zero calories and 2 delicious flavors
With IdealLean BCAAs, you get to choose from two tasty flavors that you'll actually want to drink, Green Apple or Raspberry Lemonade. Each scoop is calorie free, so you don't have to worry about extra calories.
Branched chain amino acids can bring your performance, physique, and fitness to the next level.
They have been well studied and aid in recovery, muscle growth, maintenance, and physical and mental performance during your workouts.
Try our top recommended BCAAs supplement, IdealLean and start seeing a difference today!


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In downtown Benghazi, a billboard erected in late February insisted in English, "No to foreign intervention. The Libyan people can do this on their own." That was torn down by rebels last week in a tacit acknowledgment that actually, the rebels can't do this on their own.
Indeed, three things have become clear in the international air campaign to protect Libya's uprising against Muammar Qaddafi that is now in its 12th day:
- Foreign airstrikes decisively tip the battlefield in the untrained, if eager, rebel army's direction;
- The rebels can advance easily along the sparsely inhabited desert running west towards Sirte, Qaddafi's hometown, as long as foreign warplanes are plowing the road in front of them;
- Absent that air support, Qaddafi's army drives them relentlessly back.
We've seen all of that in the past two weeks since the United Nations cleared the way for airstrikes. The armored column that threatened to overrun Benghazi, the rebel capital, was devastated by a few hours of attacks from French Mirage fighter jets on March 19.
After British Tornado aircraft destroyed at least 20 tanks, rocket launchers, and armored personnel carriers around Ajdabiya at the end of last week, the rebels finally broke the siege of that town, the last major population center before Sirte, 300 miles west.
The rebels then began their second surge across the desert, making it to the outskirts of Sirte – Qaddafi's hometown – on Sunday in their pickup trucks and Chevy sedans behind an advancing curtain of airstrikes that Qaddafi's forces had no answer for. Ras Lanuf and Bin Jawwad, two towns they lost before the UN Security Council took action, were easily reclaimed for "Free Libya."
But then yesterday, for whatever reason, the sorties that had disrupted Qaddafi's supply lines and made it impossible to move his forces east dried up.
Government troops began to flank the disorganized rebels at desert crossroads, and began to pepper them with the same rocket and mortar fire that drove them back earlier this month.
At least 10 rebels have died in the fighting around Ras Lanuf and the hamlet of Uqayla, which is further east, in the past 24 hours, according to the hospitals at Ras Lanuf and Ajdabiya.
RELATED: A primer on Libya's key cities
Airstrikes dried up yesterday. Why?
The reasons for the lack of support yesterday were unclear, though they followed a confusing speech in which President Barack Obama said international action here was not about "regime change" while also insisting that Qaddafi must leave power.
The UN mandate to "protect civilians" had been interpreted fairly expansively in its first week, with Qaddafi's tanks destroyed in clearly defensive positions around Ajdabiya. But at least for a day, the mission appeared to have shifted.
Qaddafi certainly has more support in his hometown of Sirte than in Ajdabiya, where most of the population appeared to be in open rebellion against his troops, and it could be that the US or some of its NATO allies decided that assisting a rebel assault on that town would be bending the UN resolution to the point of breaking.
Or it could simply be that the weather was bad yesterday (there are frequent localized sandstorms here), or Qaddafi's people have started using pickups and other civilian vehicles that make them harder to distinguish from the air.
This morning, rebels at the front reported renewed French airstrikes – France has been the most aggressive of the NATO members in supporting the rebellion – around Uqayla.
Libya's de facto partition enforced by air
For now the de facto partition of the country remains enforced by foreign airpower, with the line drawn somewhere in the desert between Ajdabiya and Sirte.
With the defenders of Sirte well dug in, definitely more competent and for now seemingly motivated, it's hard to see the rebels taking that town without an assault from the air. The Pentagon says it now has AC-130 and A-10 Warthogs – slow flying planes whose cannons are designed for close air support – flying in the area, but it isn't clear if they've been used yet.
It's possible that Qaddafi's loyalists in Sirte may abandon him, which could bring the war to an end quickly. Financial sanctions and a lack of fuel supplies are just starting to bite in Libya's west. They could push people around Qaddafi to reconsider their support.
But there are no signs of that yet. For now, the stalemate in the desert seems certain to persist unless offensive air operations are resumed.


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Not only did this old coot get his settlement but now he has signed a new 8 figure deal to broadcast on the #1 talk radio station in New York.
Side note: We need a new poll. I really thought he was going to wind up sitting on the ranch too.


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Wet and Wild Tofino
Every winter, lovers of outdoor drama and indoor comfort flock to the west coast of Canada's Vancouver Island.
Here on Vancouver Island's pristine west coast, winter draws avid seekers of something most of us try to avoid: bad weather. And with seasonal patterns stoking a steady parade of low-pressure fronts, storm chasers rarely have long to wait.
Like 19th-century Romantics, they feel exalted by the primordial power of wind and waves. (Unlike 19th-century Romantics, they wear advanced rain gear.) Here on the continent's edge, they contemplate majestic swells, perhaps born in a tempest on the far side of the Pacific. They take long walks, measured in breaths of damp, tangy air. If this seems eccentric, consider that the ocean moderates winter temperatures and you're never far from a blazing fireplace. Absent rogue waves and slippery slopes, even a blustery day can be delightful. With all that in mind, I decide to join the storm chasers this year.
The main town, Tofino, straddles the tip of a peninsula on this 280-mile-long island off mainland British Columbia. As the "Pacific Terminus, Trans-Canada Highway" sign attests, this is the end of the road. Once the main tourists here were whales, especially the migrating grays that stream past in spring and fall. But with its abundance of natural beauty and outdoor recreation, Tofino couldn't stay undiscovered. It's the main base for exploring the Clayoquot Sound UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, almost 900,000 acres of dense forest, deep inlets, and scattered First Nation settlements. To the south stretch miles of beach. No wonder this remote village of around 1,700 swells to more than 20,000 on a busy summer day.
But in winter, Tofino again becomes a little outpost of mellow individualists, from aging hippies to ardent environmentalists to surfers, who have good reason to like the season. "This is when the waves are best and our classes are smaller," says Krissy Montgomery of Surf Sister, a surfing school with an all-female staff. "The Tofino coast has great water access and the best surf for beginners." After dry-land instruction, she guides me into the churning breakers. Leashed to a 9-foot longboard, I quickly discover two things: A full wet suit renders the water surprisingly comfortable―refreshing rather than frigid. And it gives me the sleekness of a seal but none of the grace, making it doubly hard to "pop up" and stand on the moving board. Still, it's a great excuse to get intimate with the ocean. Later a local surfer tells me, "Surfing is like a boxing match with nature." I may have lost the first round, but I can't wait to get back in the ring.
The bracing air whets the appetite, and for its size Tofino offers remarkably good dining, at restaurants such as Raincoast Café, Shelter, and Schooner. The quirkiest must be SoBo, which serves smoked-fish chowder and other savory fare from a purple catering truck anchored at the Tofino Botanical Garden. In this 12-acre waterfront garden, whimsy flourishes. Along its winding paths I find sculptures, a hobbit-style gazebo, and plots dedicated to four groups of local settlers: First Nation peoples, Europeans, Japanese fishermen, and (marked by a gaudy, painted van) hippies.
I kayak across Browning Pass to Meares Island. It's a short trip for a memorable walk among the ancient cedars and spruce that cloak this misty preserve, rallying point for a landmark 1984 anti-logging protest. The next day, for another Edenic experience, I head northwest to Hot Springs Cove (reachable only by boat or floatplane). A 1.2-mile-long boardwalk leads to a secluded beach, where I soak like a happy clam in rock-bound thermal pools. Back in Tofino, I enjoy sampling trails that lead from near-empty parking lots through forests dripping with moisture to beaches where breakers come in endless, echoing salvos.
Those who like to view nature from the lap of luxury have a choice of beachfront resorts. The top-rated Wickaninnish Inn was the first to spark off-season interest. "We designed this to be the best place to watch storms between Mexico and Alaska," says manager Charles McDiarmid. "The Wick" provides slickers and boots for guests, and pipes surf sounds into its window-wrapped dining room. Its artful regional cuisine and decor set a high standard for other upscale hideaways, such as the cozily elegant Long Beach Lodge Resort and family-friendly Pacific Sands Beach Resort.
Most area accommodations offer packages that cater to storm buffs. But many would come regardless, to revel in the season's stirring spectacle. "We aim to bring the outside in," Charles says. He's referring to design elements, not the bald eagle I watch as it flies straight for my open balcony door. At the last minute it swoops up, out of sight―a sharp reminder that this verdant coast may be mild, but it's also unforgettably wild.
Storm Chasing
Visit hellobc.com and tourism tofino.com. B.C. Ferry and air carriers serve Nanaimo, a 2½-hour drive from Tofino. Orca Airways flies from Vancouver to Tofino; 888/359-6722 or flyorcaair.com.
Lodging: The Wickaninnish Inn (from $799 Canadian for a two-night stay); 800/333-4604 or wick
inn.com. Long Beach Lodge (from $199 Canadian) 877/844-7873 or longbeachlodgeresort.com. Pacific Sands Beach Resort (from $170 Canadian); 800/565-2322 or pacificsands.com. To overnight at Hot Springs Cove, stay at The Innchanter (from $120 Canadian); 250/670-1149 or innchanter.com.


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(It was a heroic story, but to me, it was also deeply unsettling. How was it possible that Pronovost needed to beg hospitals to adopt an essentially cost-free idea that saved so many lives? Here's an industry that loudly protests the high cost of liability insurance and the injustice of our tort system and yet needs extensive lobbying to embrace a simple technique to save up to 100,000 people.) Excerpted from this link http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200909/health-care
An alarming article; in my own experience I can count family and friends who have died or almost died due to hospital irresponsibility and negligence. My father developed the clot that killed him while in a hospital. My mother died of the mastectomy before she could die from the cancer. My father-in-law died after hospital staff yanked out his lung and put him in regular care instead of an ICU.. A friend died in child birth because the hospital anaesthesiologist did not realize she was regurgitating and put her under while she was drowning in her own vomit. I wonder, is this sad/bad enough to make the townhallers come to their senses? I THINK NOT! AND THAT'S SADDEST OF ALL! Please read the beginning of this enlightening article below. thinkingblue.blogspot.com
Almost two years ago, my father was killed by a hospital-borne infection in the intensive-care unit of a well-regarded nonprofit hospital in New York City. Dad had just turned 83, and he had a variety of the ailments common to men of his age. But he was still working on the day he walked into the hospital with pneumonia. Within 36 hours, he had developed sepsis. Over the next five weeks in the ICU, a wave of secondary infections, also acquired in the hospital, overwhelmed his defenses. My dad became a statistic—merely one of the roughly 100,000 Americans whose deaths are caused or influenced by infections picked up in hospitals. One hundred thousand deaths: more than double the number of people killed in car crashes, five times the number killed in homicides, 20 times the total number of our armed forces killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Another victim in a building American tragedy.
About a week after my father's death, The New Yorker ran an article by Atul Gawande profiling the efforts of Dr. Peter Pronovost to reduce the incidence of fatal hospital-borne infections. Pronovost's solution? A simple checklist of ICU protocols governing physician hand-washing and other basic sterilization procedures. Hospitals implementing Pronovost's checklist had enjoyed almost instantaneous success, reducing hospital-infection rates by two-thirds within the first three months of its adoption.But many physicians rejected the checklist as an unnecessary and belittling bureaucratic intrusion, and many hospital executives were reluctant to push it on them. The story chronicled Pronovost's travels around the country as he struggled to persuade hospitals to embrace his reform.
It was a heroic story, but to me, it was also deeply unsettling. How was it possible that Pronovost needed to beg hospitals to adopt an essentially cost-free idea that saved so many lives? Here's an industry that loudly protests the high cost of liability insurance and the injustice of our tort system and yet needs extensive lobbying to embrace a simple technique to save up to 100,000 people.
And what about us—the patients? How does a nation that might close down a business for a single illness from a suspicious hamburger tolerate the carnage inflicted by our hospitals? And not just those 100,000 deaths. In April, a Wall Street Journal story suggested that blood clots following surgery or illness, the leading cause of preventable hospital deaths in the U.S., may kill nearly 200,000 patients per year. How did Americans learn to accept hundreds of thousands of deaths from minor medical mistakes as an inevitability?
My survivor's grief has taken the form of an obsession with our health-care system. For more than a year, I've been reading as much as I can get my hands on, talking to doctors and patients, and asking a lot of questions.
Keeping Dad company in the hospital for five weeks had left me befuddled. How can a facility featuring state-of-the-art diagnostic equipment use less-sophisticated information technology than my local sushi bar? How can the ICU stress the importance of sterility when its trash is picked up once daily, and only after flowing onto the floor of a patient's room? Considering the importance of a patient's frame of mind to recovery, why are the rooms so cheerless and uncomfortable? In whose interest is the bizarre scheduling of hospital shifts, so that a five-week stay brings an endless string of new personnel assigned to a patient's care? Why, in other words, has this technologically advanced hospital missed out on the revolution in quality control and customer service that has swept all other consumer-facing industries in the past two generations?
I'm a businessman, and in no sense a health-care expert. But the persistence of bad industry practices—from long lines at the doctor's office to ever-rising prices to astonishing numbers of preventable deaths—seems beyond all normal logic, and must have an underlying cause. There needs to be a business reason why an industry, year in and year out, would be able to get away with poor customer service, unaffordable prices, and uneven results—a reason my father and so many others are unnecessarily killed.
Like every grieving family member, I looked for someone to blame for my father's death. But my dad's doctors weren't incompetent—on the contrary, his hospital physicians were smart, thoughtful, and hard-working. Nor is he dead because of indifferent nursing—without exception, his nurses were dedicated and compassionate. Nor from financial limitations—he was a Medicare patient, and the issue of expense was never once raised. There were no greedy pharmaceutical companies, evil health insurers, or other popular villains in his particular tragedy.
Indeed, I suspect that our collective search for villains—for someone to blame—has distracted us and our political leaders from addressing the fundamental causes of our nation's health-care crisis. All of the actors in health care—from doctors to insurers to pharmaceutical companies—work in a heavily regulated, massively subsidized industry full of structural distortions. They all want to serve patients well. But they also all behave rationally in response to the economic incentives those distortions create. Accidentally, but relentlessly, America has built a health-care system with incentives that inexorably generate terrible and perverse results. Incentives that emphasize health care over any other aspect of health and well-being. That emphasize treatment over prevention. That disguise true costs. That favor complexity, and discourage transparent competition based on price or quality. That result in a generational pyramid scheme rather than sustainable financing. And that—most important—remove consumers from our irreplaceable role as the ultimate ensurer of value.
These are the impersonal forces, I've come to believe, that explain why things have gone so badly wrong in health care, producing the national dilemma of runaway costs and poorly covered millions. The problems I've explored in the past year hardly count as breakthrough discoveries—health-care experts undoubtedly view all of them as old news. But some experts, it seems, have come to see many of these problems as inevitable in any health-care system—as conditions to be patched up, papered over, or worked around, but not problems to be solved.
That's the premise behind today's incremental approach to health-care reform. Though details of the legislation are still being negotiated, its principles are a reprise of previous reforms—addressing access to health care by expanding government aid to those without adequate insurance, while attempting to control rising costs through centrally administered initiatives. Some of the ideas now on the table may well be sensible in the context of our current system. But fundamentally, the "comprehensive" reform being contemplated merely cements in place the current system—insurance-based, employment-centered, administratively complex. It addresses the underlying causes of our health-care crisis only obliquely, if at all; indeed, by extending the current system to more people, it will likely increase the ultimate cost of true reform.
I'm a Democrat, and have long been concerned about America's lack of a health safety net. But based on my own work experience, I also believe that unless we fix the problems at the foundation of our health system—largely problems of incentives—our reforms won't do much good, and may do harm. To achieve maximum coverage at acceptable cost with acceptable quality, health care will need to become subject to the same forces that have boosted efficiency and value throughout the economy. We will need to reduce, rather than expand, the role of insurance; focus the government's role exclusively on things that only government can do (protect the poor, cover us against true catastrophe, enforce safety standards, and ensure provider competition); overcome our addiction to Ponzi-scheme financing, hidden subsidies, manipulated prices, and undisclosed results; and rely more on ourselves, the consumers, as the ultimate guarantors of good service, reasonable prices, and sensible trade-offs between health-care spending and spending on all the other good things money can buy.
These ideas stand well outside the emerging political consensus about reform. So before exploring alternative policies, let's reexamine our basic assumptions about health care—what it actually is, how it's financed, its accountability to patients, and finally its relationship to the eternal laws of supply and demand. Everyone I know has at least one personal story about how screwed up our health-care system is; before spending (another) $1trillion or so on reform, we need a much clearer understanding of the causes of the problems we all experience.


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ASC by the numbers: 13 statistics
Here are 13 statistics on ambulatory surgery centers in the United States.
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Build a Web 2.0 Platform and Employees Will Use ItBy Renee Boucher Ferguson Print
Corporate IT finds that employees of any age will use Web 2.0 applications if they are useful and effective.
BOSTON—Despite the obvious differences in technology interests between Gen X, Gen Y or the upcoming Gen Alpha, there seems to be a common thread in getting just about any aged employee to use Web 2.0 technologies: Build it and they will come—for the most part.
Following the rule that if it takes more than two pizzas to feed the team, the team's too big, Toby Redshaw, chief technology officer of Motorola, took a few developers and built a Web 2.0 platform for Motorola employees.
The concept began with the notion of fixing a disastrous electronic filing system (employees had to hire a detective to find anything in it, according to Redshaw) and ended with a platform that enables the creation of blogs, wikis, tags and enterprise search. The result has been nothing short of a communication breakthrough at Motorola.
"The whole company runs on Web 2.0. We have 4,400 blogs and 4,200 wikis," said Redshaw. "It really does work. It actually lets people see new relationships…and see what other smart people have done. The key is that it just has to be so easy to use that the adoption curve goes [straight up]. People vote with clicks. We didn't have to train anybody; we didn't have to explain it."
Redshaw said that rather than an age bias, he noticed more of an executive level bias to collaborative efforts: the higher up in the company's hierarchy the less social networking technologies get used. "That's a good thing," he said. "The real work gets done not in the board room."
Click here to read what Web 2.0 technologies IBM and Microsoft are pitching to enterprises.
Redshaw along with Mike Fratesi, communications product manager turned solutions marketing manager at Cisco, and Oliver Young, an analyst with Forrester, participated in a June 20 panel discussion at the Enterprise 2.0 conference here in Boston.
The topic of discussion: How to build an Enterprise 2.0 platform that employees will actually use. The discussion set out to test the theory that only younger people—the twenty-somethings just entering the work force—are more likely to utilize Web 2.0 technologies than the older "leathery veterans" of business.
Cisco, which acquired WebEx earlier this year, is putting a huge emphasis on Web 2.0 technologies, both as an employee imperative and a sales team product. From the top down the company—backed by CEO John Chambers—implemented a new development group to focus on collaborative software (where WebEx will live) and is funding IT to implement collaborative technologies internally.
From the bottom up, Cisco is encouraging employees to create wikis for better project management, for example, and appointing knowledge managers to share their knowledge of Web 2.0 tools and techniques with their less in-the-know colleagues.
"We are fundamentally restructuring the company to a collaborative model," said Fratesi. "We are a large company; we are growing fast; and the only way to be successful is to delegate tasks."
While Motorola and Cisco both found that "old school" employees —those 40 and older—are some of the biggest adopters of Web 2.0 technologies, Forrester's Young pointed out that there is a real age dichotomy among less tech savvy companies.
Young described a large insurance company working to get its employee base — 30 percent of whom are near retirement age — to adopt Web 2.0 technologies as facing a real struggle. He pointed out that among 18 to 21 year-olds in general, 37 percent of them are creating content either through a wiki or a blog. Conversely, among 41 to 50 year-olds, only 12 percent are creating content.
Read the full story on eWEEK.com: Build a Web 2.0 Platform and Employees Will Use It
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The moment she flipped on model Tyra Banks' "America's Next Top Model" on The CW, Sarah Christoplis knew she wanted to pursue a career in fashion.
Seven years later, hands-on experience in Temescal Canyon High School's fashion design class helped the 17-year-old senior land a job as a merchandiser with The Gap, as well as a position as the project manager for the class's design of a red dress that will be revealed Feb. 22 at the Lake Elsinore Outlet as part of the American Heart Association's Go Red campaign.
"I know it sounds totally corny, but I love watching their fashion shows," Christoplis said. "That's when I decided what I wanted to do. I was 10 years old and I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life."
At Temescal Canyon, Lesa Gallagher's fashion design course teaches its students all the tools of the trade, a modern evolution of home economics courses that once upon a time simply taught students how to sew buttons onto shirts, make egg sandwiches and balance checkbooks.
Now, Gallagher is helping today's up-and-coming fashionistas get an inside track with real-world training: Her students design the dress, draw up the patterns, buy the fabric, make the dress and design the window that it will be displayed in at the Lake Elsinore Outlets.
Last year's dress -- the first that Temescal Canyon's fashion club designed for the Go Red campaign -- was ultimately auctioned off with proceeds benefitting the American Heart Association. This year's dress will have an even stronger connection to the Temescal Canyon family because it is dedicated to former librarian Nancy Reynolds, who died after suffering a heart attack in September after 19 years at the school.
"She was a huge advocate for all of our programs (at Temescal Canyon)," Gallagher said of Reynolds. "She was so helpful to everyone. If we ever needed anything, she would be there for us. The kids all loved her. She was a good mother to all of our kids."
Now, Gallagher's students are giving back in a campaign meant to bring awareness to the fact that heart disease isn't simply an older man's fight. In fact, cardiovascular disease is the No. 1 killer of women each year, according to the American Heart Association, a fact that wasn't lost on 17-year-old senior Jessica Hamilton as she helped direct about a dozen students in the early stages of this year's design of the class's red dress design.
"For me, with the red dress, heart disease runs in my family so it's a big deal," Hamilton said. "My grandpa died from it and my grandma has suffered a heart attack. It's a part of me, and giving back to help people is what really matters."
Added Christoplis: "We thought it would be a great way to give back to (Reynolds) because she did so much to help us with a lot of stuff and was with our school for a really long time."
To that end, Christoplis and Hamilton were scurrying about their class Monday morning in the early stages of the design of the dress, which will have a poofy base made out of red tulle, a red rose belt and a white chiffon top.
The program's second-, third- and fourth-year students will complete both its dress and window design in time for the American Heart Month reveal at the Lake Elsinore Outlets, where Gallagher's class volunteers dressing retail stores' windows.
In addition to participating in the Go Red campaign, Gallagher's students fund their endeavors with embroidery and quilt-making businesses, where they employ the various skills they've picked up in a class geared toward prepping students for a fashion industry that's become one of the state's largest industries.
Graduates have gone on to become dressmakers, costume designers and professional buyers, and Christoplis believes she's already well on her way to becoming a fashion show producer with the experience she's picked up in Gallagher's program.
"Pretty much everything I know is from this class," Christoplis said. "I knew how to sew before, but it taught me a lot more than that -- how to dress windows, make my own patterns, do fashion shows and style. Pretty much everything you need for fashion."


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We've already established that there's no real link between Super Bowl XLII and Super Bowl XLVI.
What about the regular season meeting between these two teams? The Giants beat the Patriots 24-20 on a last minute touchdown pass to Jake Ballard. A review of what went down that day offers plenty of insight into what might happen this weekend.
These aren't quite the same two teams that played in Foxborough. The Giants played that game without running back Ahmad Bradshaw, wide receiver Hakeem Nicks and center David Baas, all of whom are expected to play major roles in the Super Bowl.
U.S. & World
The day's top national and international news.
On the other side of the field, the story is the players that aren't there. Safety Josh Barrett's season ended in Week Nine, the Patriots later lost defensive end Andre Carter to injury and defensive tackle Albert Haynesworth and cornerback Philip Adams are no longer with the team.
The Patriots defense wasn't great this season, but the Giants caught them at a moment when they were still trying to figure out just what they had.
Because of those differences, it is hard to read much into the performance of the Giants offense against the Patriots defense. Eli Manning didn't have one of his best games of the season, but he caught fire late.
He was helped by a pair of long pass interference penalties and the strange choice by the Patriots to play special teamers Tracy White and Sergio Brown on defense on the final drive. Manning beat each one of them on the way to Ballard's game-winning score.
The biggest takeaway from that matchup is probably the fact that the Patriots couldn't generate any pass rush whatsoever against Manning. Given time to throw, especially with Nicks in the lineup, Manning will eventually make plays against any defense. The Giants offensive line remains a weakness, but only if the Pats can make them pay more than they did in Week Nine.
We can read more into the way the Giants defense handled Tom Brady that day because it is similar to what we've seen from the unit over the last five games. They pressured him on almost every passing down and forced him to hurry almost every pass he threw over the first three quarters. Brady caught fire late, but it wasn't enough to overcome an even hotter Manning.
It was as bad a game as Brady has ever played to that point, and he wasn't helped by the Patriots' scheme. The team went with heavy protection often and rarely used the hurry-up, which has been their bread-and-butter in the 10 straight wins that followed the loss to the Giants.
Part of the reason for that might have been their attempt to use Chad Ochocinco (five targets) and the decision to abandon the running game, which could have kept the Giants from rushing with abandon.
You would expect all of those things to change, even if Rob Gronkowski is less than 100 percent. Ochocinco won't play much, the Pats have been more committed to the run and the offense has done a good job of dictating the pace of games.
The Patriots' entire offensive gameplan was one that reeked of being scared of the Giants defense. They were taken out of their game and the result wasn't a good one for them. They'll still need to shut down Jason Pierre-Paul and Justin Tuck, no easy task, and the Giants' three safety did well against the dangerous Pats tight ends in the regular season.
What should be heartening to the Patriots is that Brady, who wound up with three turnovers, can't play any worse than he did that week, and the defense was a shell of what it is now. Despite that, they still had a very good chance to win the game.
For the Giants, they can point to their victory as well as the fact that they left a lot of points on the board before Manning got rolling down the stretch. Their defense was good that week, but it is playing at an even higher level now and they know that Brady can be thrown off his game with a strong, sustained pass rush.
Playing once during the regular season means that both teams will have lots of tape to watch. Adjustments will be key on both sides, but a review of Week Nine leaves us feeling pretty sure that Sunday's game will come down to another exciting fourth quarter.


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You should be afraid, very afraid, when you enter the Duval County Courthouse. Security there fails to meet even minimum national standards, according to experts on the subject. This means that, when you enter the courthouse, you might be:
• Shot or stabbed by someone who exploits holes in entry security and brings weapons through metal detectors.
• Blown to bits by truck bombs that are driven into the building or by improvised shrapnel explosives placed in trash cans and hides.
• Shot by a sniper from the unpatrolled parking building.
It shouldn't be this way. The 2013 fiscal year budget for court protection is $12,615,821. The Jacksonville Sheriff's Office employs 280 personnel at the courthouse. In addition, it contracts with G4S Security, an international company with offices in 10 Florida cities, to provide private security staff for 1,820 hours per week. This equates to 45 people working 40 hours per week. Calls to G4S to obtain details about security guard training and compensation were not returned.
In phone calls and emails with one spokesperson from the mayor's office and two from JSO, all declined to comment on the topic of courthouse security beyond providing budget and staffing figures.
Violent incidents in courthouses are up 670 percent between 2005 and 2011, according to the National Center for State Courts (NCSC), which compiles statistics and has published the national best practices for courthouse security. Shootings, stabbings, arson, assaults and bombings are increasing.
On June 23, an unknown assailant fired two shots into the home of Judge Timothy Corrigan. It's possible the assailant attacked the judge at home precisely because, as a federal judge, he presides over trials in the U.S. District Courthouse on Hogan Street, which has extremely tight security. Had Corrigan been in the Duval County Courthouse, the attacker might have gotten lucky, and his honor might now be decomposing rather than judging.
Courthouses are full of unhappy campers. Except for the staff and judges, who are comfortably salaried, and the attorneys, who are clocking $250 an hour and up, everyone else in the building is being sued, fined, prosecuted, involuntarily committed to a mental health facility, "violated" into prisons for breaking their conditions of probation, or having their children snatched by former spouses or the Florida Department of Children & Families. Each day is a pissed-off people parade. The scent of rage and fear wafts upward from the atrium's gleaming marble floor to the seventh-story Valhalla of the senior judges.
As an author of books about jails, prisons and criminal justice, I'm acutely aware of security. I've spent years sitting across steel tables from murderers, psychotics, child molesters and armed robbers. I have a professional as well as personal interest to assure that I exit a jail or courthouse with the same number of arms, legs, ears and eyeballs with which I enter.
The Duval County Courthouse gives me the creeps, even more than the federal pen in Folkston where Uncle Sam warehouses some seriously evil inmates.
To test the courthouse security, I spent two days inside the building. I walked the halls, ascended stairways, popped in and out of courtrooms, bathrooms, offices and the restaurant; circled the dizzying balconies, and passed through metal detectors over and over. I photographed the results with a hidden camera. I spent another day outdoors, locating potential bomb hides and checking exterior entries, hiding spots, delivery areas and the prisoner sally port. For two additional days, I photographed the exteriors of the courthouse and parking garage, the anti-vehicle bollards around city buildings and the U.S. District Courthouse.
While writing this article, I passed through metal detectors many more times over a period of six weeks, since I am often at the courthouse on business. I spent a final afternoon inside the parking garage looking for sniper hides and escape routes. I checked each level to estimate field of fire, shooting angle, bullet drop and windage to determine whether a shooter of modest ability, using an ordinary rifle with iron sights, could be successful.
If you're billing five figures and wearing a suit with no elbow shine, this is called a security audit. If you're writing for Northeast Florida's favorite alternative weekly and swanning around in Walmart couture, it's called snooping.
What I found was horrifying. To confirm that these observations were percipient, not paranoiac, I interviewed experts to ascertain what the best practices are for courthouse security.
Fasten your seatbelt. It's going to be a bumpy ride.
Walk-through metal detectors are the primary defense against the guns, garrotes, knives, dirks, daggers, batons, billies, balisongs, nunchuks and ninja stars that people bring to courthouses to dispense the street justice that no judge or jury will give them.
At the Duval courthouse, there are plenty of detectors, manned by about a dozen snappily uniformed private agents from G4S Security, an international company headquartered in Jupiter, Fla.
Beyond the detectors, each floor is manned by uniformed, armed bailiffs.
Bailiffs are certified and sworn law enforcement officers who have graduated from the police academy.
They wear uniforms like cops, can arrest you like cops and can kill you like cops, but there are differences. First, according to the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office job description, they start at $16.03 per hour.
Unfortunately, they are generally older and fatter than the in-shape officers with the crew cuts (or snazzy buns and braids) and the too-cool-for-school sunglasses who manage the mayhem on the streets. Think of bailiffs as "popo lite."
Nonetheless, there are plenty of uniformed bailiffs with badges and guns in the courthouse, in addition to the private security guards. Looks good, right?
At the Duval courthouse, entry security has more holes than a murderer's alibi. I have an artificial knee that contains approximately the same amount of steel as a medium-sized revolver. I passed through court detectors dozens of times over several weeks. On each occasion, the detector alerted. The security agents, however, passed the hand wand no lower than my midsection. Without exception, they said the alert was, "Just the belt buckle."
Why is this a big deal? Because, without thorough checking with hand magnetometers, bad guys can carry in guns, grenades, even a small rocket launcher, as long as the kill tools are strapped to their lower legs.
So how is metal detection supposed to be done? I talked with Timothy Fautsko, one of the authors of courthouse best practices for the National Center for State Courts (NCSC) in Williamsburg, Va. His prescription? "Security agents should hand-wand each person who sets off an alert, going slowly up and down each leg, front and back, until the cause of the alert is located."
I also discussed this problem with Jacksonville criminal defense attorney Jeremy Laznetski. His comment? "Security is certainly tighter at the federal courthouse." That's an understatement.
Recently, I went to the U.S. District Courthouse to pull paper on some lowlife bankrupt. When my steel knee triggered the beep, security guards frisked my knee, and everything else, from eyebrows to toenails. They do this every single time I go there. When I tried to sneak in a prohibited item (cellphone) into the building, I was politely, but firmly, tossed.
Dale Carson is a Jacksonville criminal defense attorney and former FBI agent who famously designed the multiple cordons of electronic and human security on Cumberland Island that kept the John F. Kennedy Jr. wedding private and the swarming paparazzi and celebrity-crazed palookas far away on the other side of the Intracoastal. (Full disclosure: Carson is also co-author of one of my books.) His take on the Duval courthouse was the following: "The illusion of security is what gets people killed. Inside the courthouse, the public is no more safe than they would be on any street in Jacksonville, except Moncrief."
True that. On Moncrief Road, where violence has attained mythical status with the prisoners I've interviewed over the years, any thinking person would feel afraid behind two inches of rolled armor. The bad guys often show me their .50 caliber handguns and 7.62 x 39mm assault weapons that will blast concrete and steel and zip through Kevlar vests. The place is downright hairy.
Hand-wanding and frisking legs and ankles aren't particle physics. So why don't courthouse security guards check more thoroughly? I spent an hour sitting by the metal detectors, camera silently recording, to find the answer. In short, many guards can't bend down to check legs and ankles during their shift. They're too big to bend and too fat to pat.
Many may be too old. I say this with sorrow since I, too, am an overweight senior citizen, and a gimp to boot. I have no illusion, however, that I could be an effective courthouse guard. I can barely subdue my shih tzu, much less a young and frisky felon. At the Duval courthouse, the machines work perfectly; the people don't.
Inside a courthouse, patrolling is an essential best practice. Charlie Jenney, of Giddens Security Corporation in Jacksonville, directs security at the St. Johns, Marion, Clay and Hendry county courthouses. He gave a detailed description of courthouse patrolling:
"We have officers who are 'dedicated rovers.' They conduct both periodic and random patrols. They're looking for anything, or anyone, that appears out of place. They're especially alert for unattended luggage, briefcases and backpacks. They go down corridors and into offices, bathrooms, cabinets, closets — everywhere. They poke into trash cans, open cabinets and check door locks."
At the Duval courthouse, there are an astonishing number of armed, uniformed bailiffs, seven stories of them. Most of them cluster, and repose, in soft chairs and comfortable benches around the central atrium and balconies. I spent days watching them not watch me. I limped along lonely corridors, staggered up and down staircases and cruised in and out of bathrooms. Not once did I see an officer patrolling. In fact, I found card-lock doors to secure areas were open because locks were insufficiently lubricated to allow doors to self-close. I walked into supposedly off-limits offices, peered into cubicles and chatted up the chicks. Nobody said "boo."
Worse, I found doors to the outside open for the same reason. Unlocked stairwell doors are a horrific risk. They could allow bad guys to exit the building, retrieve weapons, then bring them inside without passing through metal detectors.
The National Center for State Courts states that growing threats to courthouses and the public are fire bombs and explosives placed outside the buildings. NCSC expert Fautsko emphasized that exterior patrolling is essential. The purpose is to deter people before they set fires, destroy vehicles and hide bombs.
Outside patrols also deter assailants who try to take non-metallic weapons like wooden and stone knives, "ballistic pens" and plastic shivs inside courthouses to stab witnesses, judges, lawyers and opposing parties. None of these weapons will set off a metal detector.
In Florida, law enforcement officers can legally stop and frisk suspicious people — but the officers have to be there first. Outside the Duval County Courthouse, and in the cavernous Adams Street parking garage, they're absent.
You could whistle up a cop faster in the Gobi Desert.
So where were the blue suits? Mostly they were butt-glued to comfy chairs. They were yakking it up with other officers, chatting into cellphones and surfing the web on iPhones, Androids and government-issued desktop computers. So many officers seemed mesmerized by the Internet's glowing eye that I momentarily mistook them for pod people receiving commands from the Mother Ship. If any officers actually patrolled during the days I roamed the courthouse, they were in a parallel universe.
That the Duval County Courthouse will, according to Jacksonville Public Works Department figures, cost $245 million and that it consists primarily of a seven-story column of expensive, conditioned air, have been exhaustively discussed. What no one is talking about is that the building was designed to dazzle, not to protect, the people who go there. Aesthetically, it's beautiful; security-wise, it's a clear and present danger. Here's why:
Cops-in-the-box: On every floor, bailiffs sit in control booths. Some booths have doors with locks. The booths control bailiffs, not bad guys. A young, in-shape attacker can cover
8 yards per second at full gallop. By the time an officer can get out of the chair and open the door, the bad guy would be gone. A few citizens might be gone, too.
Bailiffs are boxed inside courtrooms as well. Many officers assigned to protect judges and maintain order sit behind heavy wooden barriers. Some have not one but two glowing computer screens blocking their view. Should a fight or an attack occur, they're out of position and ineffective, assuming they're paying attention and not emailing, texting and ogling hotties on the taxpayer dime.
On the vertiginous balconies, bailiffs are boxed in smaller booths that face the wrong way. They are located against the walls, looking toward the balconies. Officers should be on foot, patrolling along the handrails and looking in. The balconies are catnip for suicides and a temptation to assailants. They offer shooters a wide field of fire. If the balloon ever drops, the "control booth" officers will be out of position, unable to help and targeted themselves. I've interviewed too many people who enjoyed killing to have any illusions about what human beings can do when they don't fear death or cops or heaven or hell.
Missing bollards: Without exception, experts recommend that courthouses be protected by anti-vehicular barriers. Generally, these are steel-and-concrete bollards sunk deep into the earth. They will saw speeding cars and trucks in half should they try to run over pedestrians, ram through doors or detonate explosives.
Many government buildings in Jacksonville, including City Hall, have bollards — except for the courthouse, which is the biggest, fattest target of them all. Two blocks away from the Duval County Courthouse, the U.S. District Courthouse is surrounded by super-hard, high-tensile steel bollards that can destroy a car or truck and seriously inconvenience an armored personnel carrier.
Fragsonville, Fla.: Courthouse bailiffs may look relaxed, but they're packing heat. The uniformed bailiffs I observed carried automatic pistols in side holsters. These are generally 9mm or .40-caliber weapons that hold an average of 15 rounds. That's scary, because the building is floored and walled with stone slabs. A bullet that misses a bad guy will ricochet, shatter, and spall out razor-edged shards of rock. With no carpet and no sheetrock, there's nothing to catch the frag except citizens' flesh.
Boom-Boom Boulevard: Since the Boston Marathon bombing, everyone older than an embryo understands the havoc that can be caused by low explosives packed into pressure cookers and pipes. They know how ball bearings, BBs and nails multiply the kill. In its publication "Courthouse Security Incidents Trending Upward," the NCSC notes that interior building security is causing an "incident displacement effect." Translated into English, this means that when bad guys see metal detectors and uniforms inside the courthouse, they get spooked, then set their firebombs and explosives outside the courthouse.
News boxes and trash cans are high-risk bomb hides. According to Fautsko, the best practice is "to move them away from people." At the Duval courthouse, the boxes and cans have been moved away from the building, but closer to the crowds that throng the broad walkway leading to the entrance.
The boxes hide bombs at waist level. This is more likely to maximize kills and injuries than the ground-level placement of the pressure-cooker bombs that Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev detonated during the Boston Marathon. As for courthouse trash cans — these are made of mild steel bars cross-hatched from the rim to the base. In an explosion, those bars would become flying machetes.
Glass houses: A comparison of the exterior glass used at the Duval County Courthouse with the U.S. District Courthouse two blocks away is instructive. Glass at the federal court is laminated onto multiple layers of polyvinyl butyral and rated to resist shattering. It's curved — to deflect a blast — and strengthened by metal beams. After Tim McVeigh destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City with a truck bomb in 2001, the U.S. General Services Administration set tough standards for reinforcing federal buildings against explosives. When it comes to security, the feds don't play.
Glass at the Duval courthouse, by contrast, is flat. It will resist, rather than deflect, blast pressure waves. The website of the designer, Harmon of Minneapolis, describes the metal latticework as "ornamental aluminum trim." That means it's decorative, not structural. When some rage-head drives a load of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil explosive up to the glass, and then hits the button, you don't want decorative.
Providing security at a courthouse is like administering anesthesia — overwhelming boredom punctuated by occasional terror. The daily routine of a courthouse can be described in two words: terrible tedium. People shuffle around the balconies and in the halls. They mutter into cellphones, confer with witnesses and attorneys, and commiserate, and sometimes bewail, judicial outcomes. All you hear, however, is a hypnotic hum. Inside the courtrooms, lawyers drone, witnesses stutter through their attorney prep, and judges perorate. Eyes glaze; heads droop.
That's the problem. The place is full of felons, rage-heads, whack-jobs and their charming families and friends, some of whom would like to slit your throat, and you can barely keep your eyes open!
Jenney of Giddens Security said he trains his security officers to avoid what he calls "Condition White," the mental state in which you daydream and do not consciously see where you're going, and "Condition Black," the emergencies in which you flood your
body with adrenaline and shut down your
pre-frontal cortex and ability to think rationally. In the Duval courthouse, too many officers are in a third state, "Condition Snooze."
It's serious work to stay on task day after day when nothing happens. As Carson noted, "When security officers are distracted, or unconscious, you have no security at all."
There's no secret to basic courthouse security. It's public information and, for the most part, common sense. An organizational infrastructure of government agencies, professional organizations, equipment vendors and security consultants exists to advise court administrators. Courthouse security conferences are held around the country every year.
The good news? The Duval courthouse already has the necessary security hardware — metal detectors, X-ray machines, hand wands, alarms, card locks, surveillance video, security control rooms, etc. The court employs an adequate number of private uniformed officers at the main entrance, and a more than adequate number of bailiffs.
That's the easy part, because it only requires money. The hard part is execution. This requires managing hundreds of people so that they perform a boring job to perfection, day after day. Here are some suggestions, in standard English rather than the mushy, bureaucrat-speak of government agencies and non-profits:
Bend, squat, frisk, repeat: Sooner than immediately, the security guards manning the metal detectors must start using magnetometer wands correctly. This means
bending down to the floor and frisking — up and down, front and back, side to side — everyone who causes metal detectors to alert. They need to do this all day, every day, with no exceptions. If they don't, people will be killed.
Off the fannies, onto the feet: The failure of courthouse law enforcement officers to patrol the courthouse, its perimeter and the parking garage is an outrage. Fortunately, the fix requires nothing more than a world-class ass-chewing of all and sundry. The mayor, the sheriff and the chief judge can decide among themselves who gets to bark first. And, yes, get rid of those comfy chairs and those absurd "control" boxes. Inside courtrooms, officers should move around and watch people, not computer screens.
Long-term, given the tedium of courthouse security, the detail should not be a job; it should be a rotation. The courthouse should be staffed in part by real police — patrol officers fresh from the streets and corrections officers fresh from the cells. These guys have frequent experience scuffling with bad guys and crazies on asphalt and concrete. Because they can chase, tackle, handcuff and subdue, they're less likely than older, out-of-shape bailiffs to draw firearms and blast innocents inside that rock-lined shooting gallery.
Every day, street cops and corrections officers handle people who are violent, drugged and psychotic. They know what to look for — twitchy eyeballs, wiggly fingers, sweat, tremors, crude lies and incoherent babble. They know where to find weapons. They get amped when they see floppy shirts, deep pockets, fat purses and loosey-goosey boots.
Corrections officers are skilled in locating and seizing non-metallic weapons that cannot be detected by magnetometers. They regularly find these wooden and plastic pig-stickers in the jail and on the P-Farm (cop slang for prison farm) out on Lannie Road.
Officers need to be outside the courthouse entrance, on the stairs, looking at people before they go in. That famous "cop stare," a look that goes right through your skull, can make potential assailants bolt. Real police are needed to keep a hard eye on Clay, Adams and Duval streets. If a terror truck makes the run, they'll have only seconds to kill the driver or disable the vehicle. Until bollards are installed, they'll need real firepower. That means high-caliber weapons with armor-piercing rounds that destroy engines.
Make dumb phones de rigueur: Banish smartphones for bailiffs. Walmart burners work fine and will enable Internet-hypnotized staff to return to planet Earth. Besides, all those popo online are slowing the court's free Wi-Fi. While we citizens are waiting for justice to roll down as waters and righteousness as a mighty stream, we want our sports scores, recipes and Facebook pages to download lickety-split.
Stick it to 'em: Issue batons so patrolling officers can poke into trash cans and crannies to search out things that go tick-tock, then boom. Batons have other uses. A smack to the carotids will drop assailants, unconscious, to the ground, and a jab to the stones will keep them occupied while the cuffs go on. This beats firing guns indoors and splattering brains onto those magnificent floors.
Promote pellets: For indoor use, replace hollow-point ammunition with frangible rounds. These have plastic slugs that hold metallic pellets. They kill bad guys without passing through them. When frangibles hit walls, the pellets are less likely to injure innocents than ricocheting lead.
Bust out the Bush Hog: Brush has grown up along the Adams Street frontage and created hiding places for thugs and bombs. Fire up the mowers and whack that thatch!
Bring on the bollards: Start sawing concrete and dropping bollards into the deep-delved earth. In the rear of the building, install retractable bollards at the delivery entrance and prisoner sally port. The iron gates there are flimsy. If the city doesn't sink bollards, when disaster strikes, plaintiffs' attorneys will sink the city.
Vanish the boxes; trash the cans: The news boxes need to be moved to nearby locations less tempting to bombers. Trash cans should be replaced with blast-resistant containers. Composed of multiple layers of steel and composites, these mitigate blast, direct it upward, and resist fragmentation. By design, they look boringly ordinary. This tempts bad guys to drop bombs in the cans rather than in stealthier, deadlier hides.
It's puzzling. At the jail and the prison farm, the sheriff runs a famously tight, safe and secure operation that I've written about in my books. The courthouse, by contrast, seems an afterthought. If I were a judge in that place, with security as it is today, I'd pack a gat in the briefcase, have the suit vests cut from Kevlar, and bolt composite armor behind the bench!
There are two reasons that people who work in the court think they're safe when they aren't. First, they're lulled by the illusion of security. All those cops, metal detectors, cameras and alarms must mean everyone's secure, right?
You know the answer.
Second, police, judges and attorneys sometimes don't understand how dangerous psychotics and felons truly are. Perhaps they shouldn't. The knowledge of evil and its dark, mad joy is forbidden fruit, a black apple from the Garden of Hell.
Understood or not, violent and insane people pass through this building daily on their way to prisons and asylums. If security doesn't tighten up soon in the courthouse, that shining monument to justice and civic pride will one day plunge, in an instant, into the hideous Batman world of violence and death,
Called Crime City.
Good Grief! I would not have given this subject much thought, but now, frankly, a trip to the County Court House is down right creepy. Thank you, Mr. Denham, for pointing out what should be obvious to those who are plainly oblivious, myself included. I would really hate to be on a sensitive jury situation knowing that security at Ducal County Court House was this abysmal. That or just going in to file normal routine paperwork in a place that seems to be teeming with uniforms and guns, but who obviously are bored to tears with their jobs and who feel so falsely secure. One hopes something is done about this situation, that perhaps judges might insist on better security, not just the illusion of it.
Wednesday, September 11, 2013|Report this
Great article. The fact that the courthouse was built to "look pretty" and not necesarily secure is not surprising. If they ever put a Dunkin Donuts in there the building will be paid off within a few years. Thursday, September 12, 2013|Report this
Security provided by Fat Old Farts, Inc. Friday, September 13, 2013|Report this


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