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A while back, I launched The Who Gives A F*** What You’re Doing Campaign. It was intended to keep Facebook users from posting stupid shit about their kids and pets; tales of marathon running, road biking, and yoga; pictures of their meals and hobbies; or anything related to the weather, hating work, or Monday.
TWGAFWYDC worked as such: If somebody posted something on Facebook that annoyed you out of its complete impertinence to your life or your rational sense of what is truly worth sharing, you would comment, “Who gives a f***!”. It was an ambitious movement with the ultimate goal of training the social networking community to police itself, resulting in more interesting and more relevant content.
Initially, TWGAFWYDC had legs. Comment disses were flying all over Facebook with the fierceness of Sully Sullenberger flying into the Hudson River. Soon, however, it faded like The Great Doppelganger Craze of early 2010 or The 2 Girls 1 Cup Mania of mid-2008. I think people felt it was too personal, that if somebody’s gonna take the time to post, not matter how inane their posting, they deserve to be heard. I disagree, but the people spoke.
Well now, I’m launching a new campaign that actually may stick. It’s called The Who Gives A F*** Where You Are Campaign and it assails only a portion of overzealous social networking behaviors — the use of location-based social networking apps like FourSquare, GoWalla, and most recently, Facebook Places.
Right when Twitter was hitting the tipping point, I evaluated it. I said it was a a useless piece of s***, a flash in the pan, and a viable candidate to become a really hard Double Jeopardy answer in 2012. Turns out I was wrong.
Well now, it looks like location-based social networking apps are set to have their Twitter moment. In my humble opinion though, I highly doubt they’re going to have the same longevity and significance. Why? Because they’re stupid.
Basically, they’re simple applications that usually reside on a smartphone. When you go somewhere, you hit a button, the app finds out where you are, then broadcasts it to all the idiots that are stupid enough to follow a dumbass like you on your social networks.
These apps annoy me because, as of late, I can’t log on to Facebook without finding out that one of my “friends” is at Carl’s Jr. or Dress Barn. I can’t log on to Twitter without finding out that someone I “follow” is at Supercuts or H&R Block.
I gotta tell ya — I don’t give a f***! And neither should you.
Are we really so desperate for a human connection that we need to know where our acquaintances are at all times? Maybe if we’re stalkers. Do we really need to be subjected to the boastings of people that actually think we’re impressed that they’re at a certain restaurant or club? Hell no! Location-based social networking apps are completely useless.
Has anybody ever discovered that their buddy from accounting is at The Container Store in Cherry Creek, then got in the car to join him for a nice day of browsing for innovative storage and organization products? Has anybody ever noticed that their junior high crush is at Jenny Craig on Colorado Boulevard, then biked over to join her for a group weigh-in? I doubt it.
So why do location-based social media users bother “checking in” at every stop they make in their pathetic lives?
Are they bragging? I’m not impressed that you eat at Chipotle. Sure, their burritos are delicious, but a lot of others have eaten them too. Are they hoping for validation of their life choices? If you’re male and you’re spending a sunny Sunday at Hobby Lobby, you’re beyond the need for validation, you need a lobotomy. Do they want to organize a get-together? OK, that’s acceptable. However, do they really want all of their 9 million friends involved in this get-together? If not, then why don’t they just do it the old fashioned way — by text message or BBM or FaceTime?
On Foursquare, they give you badges and titles for being a superuser. You’re The Mayor of The Gap at The Aurora Southlands Mall? That means you’ve gone to The Gap at The Aurora Southlands Mall more than anyone else in the world. You get recognized for that? Really? You did not map the human genome and you did not solve the global clean water crisis. You bought a few moderately priced plaid shirts. Get a life, or at least go to Banana Republic once in a while.
On a side note, how come nobody ever shares that they’re doing anything worthwhile? People are always at the dry cleaner or the tanning salon or the tattoo parlor. How come nobody’s ever at The Opera or Habitat for Humanity? My guess — because they’re wasting so much time checking in at useless places.
And how come nobody ever checks in when they’re visiting embarrassing locations — your proctologist’s office or Curves or The Church of Scientology or a teabagger rally? Don’t be selective about where you check in. If you’re gonna overshare, then go all out and over-f******-share!
Regardless, with all this location-based social networking, are you really enjoying where you are? Checking in is another chore while you’re doing your chores. And, isn’t the goal of being out of the office to check out? Is life a job? Do we really need to punch a time clock for our leisure time? F***!
So… as I said before, I’m officially launching The Who Gives A F*** Where You Are Campaign. If you’re on Twitter and you see that your wife’s friend’s husband used complex GPS technology to alert the world that he went to Honey Baked Ham, reply with, “Who gives a f***!”. If you’re on Facebook and you read that your mortgage broker’s sister used her gorgeous new iPhone 4 to let everyone she knows know that she’s at The Playful Pooch Kennel, post a comment saying, “Who gives a f***!”. Repeat and repeat and repeat.
If we all take part in TWGAFWYAC, Gowalla and Foursquare and all of their copycats will begin to perish. Facebook Places and Google Latitude and all the other corporate attempts to cash in on this ridiculous fad will also perish. And we, the people of the social networking universe can safely return to reading status updates about Farmville, Bravo reality show spoilers, biased and uninformed opinions about sports, repetitive birthday wishes, and everything else that makes social networking so great. I still won’t give a f***.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Xavier Beauvois is a friend. In my mind, he is even one of the very few who, once, nearly fifteen years ago, was involved (without ever having renounced it) in the adventure of my film, Le Jour et la nuit. Does that mean I should refrain from expressing how much I was moved by his own film, Des Hommes et des dieux, portraying the last days in the lives of the French monks of Tibehirine, assassinated by Islamists in 1996, in Algeria? Nevertheless, the point is not actually Algeria. In reality, it is a film that is not about Algeria, nor terrorism, nor even about this other planet-wide persecution I referred to in an interview with a Spanish daily last week, one that targets Christians. No. It is a film about saintliness. About the time of saintliness. It is a film that shows the ordinary of seven existences, seized in a time frame that is slack, almost pure, eventless, which is another name for saintliness. The approach of the killers. The waiting, more unbearable from second to second for us, the audience, and for them, the seven monks, a source of intense fervor. Their impassive faces as they share the last meal. The soul, defenseless, and yet invincible. The dying flame of a life and the chapel of rest of the heart. Doubt, sometimes. Peace, finally. The dissolving contours of thought when the final act comes and they must accept to follow the killers, their courage mixed with horror. Prayer itself, which becomes almost useless and that Beauvois, it seems to me, in any case stops filming. The slowness, especially. The earth and the sky ablaze and yet time that seems to be frozen. Rarely has a film been so very slow, so passionately and spiritually slow, and yet, made the heart beat so very fast.
Michel Houellebecq is another friend. And, not so long ago, we published a book together, Ennemis publics. Should that prevent me from expressing here, after so many others I did not wish to precede, my admiration for his latest novel, La Carte et le territoire, in which he has, to my mind, arrived at the summit of his art? The breakdown, this time, of all reverence. The mourning of all saintliness. The triumph of the mediocre, the indifferent, the neuter. Failed lives. The defeat of language as the gold standard of meaning. At the heart of the novel, the counterfeit of art, very precisely, of the narrative. And then, suddenly, two events. First of all, the Father. This strange figure of the Father, inaccessible and familiar, hidden and, nonetheless, lacking mystery. This father like an empty house with his elusive secrets, his strong-rooms open to the four winds and these mazes of ancestry which Houellebecq, for the first time, apparently wishes to concentrate on. And then he, the author, the appearance of the author himself, taken by surprise in his Irish exile, who cuts into the novel, breaks up its until-then perfectly classic trajectory and sets it off, but in a different way, on an unexpected tangent. He, Houellebecq, really? Or his double? Or the ghost of his double? Or, perhaps, a stranger, but one who, like the devil, would have taken on the appearance of this other double? You’ll see. That’s the surprise. Just be aware that death is there, as it must be, at the rendez- vous. This death that, as always, knows all the tricks, the disguises, the hiding places. This death that never catches you better than at the moment when you thought, as in this instance, that you could be more clever than he is. A great work, Gracq once said, isn’t it always a way of committing one to the grave?
Theo Van Gogh, the film maker who was stabbed and had his throat slit by an Islamist in Amsterdam in 2004, had a vision of the world and of Islam that I do not share. But in this text by him, Interview, directed by Hans Peter Cloos at the Studio des Champs-Elyses, in Paris, Patrick Mille — more than a friend, my son-in-law — plays one of the principal roles, confronting the radiant Sara Forestier. Is this a reason for me not to recommend one of the most incontestably intriguing shows of the opening of an otherwise rather dreary Parisian theatre season? A special correspondent at the end of his tether and a starlet already in dire straits. Show business. Its laws. Its rites, its burlesque altars, its cynicism, the whole sideshow. And the human, as a result, like a shipwreck that has already happened. Lives that are no long minuscule, just superfluous. Lying as second nature. The world as a consequence definitively lacking a cause. The memory of men itself that has become an aviary where vague and rare recollections (Sarajevo or a Serbian pistol at the temple for the hero, an episode from a soap opera for the heroine) collide like birds flying around in a cage. And then, here, a Freudian slip. There, a word that rings true. And there again, a sentiment that quivers, that wants to prevail. And then love, well, yes, good old love, that returns pattering softly like the footsteps of a dove and, little by little, takes over. A bizarre sort of love. A love almost homonymous with what bore that name before these times of post-humanity and their terminal thoughts. A love like a martial art. A love like a defeat anticipated by each one. A love where one makes sure he doesn’t show his cards until he is very certain that he no longer has a winning hand. But finally, love, all the same, with its devouring words, its voice from the gut, and its leaps of the heart. Things go badly. One senses the risk of death that may, once again, win out. But if we seek the exact image of how the religion of nihilism has changed us all slightly, it is there. And one recalls Sade’s words, “If aetheism is looking for martyrs, it has only to say so, my blood is ready.”

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

I led a session at the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) last week entitled “Green Jobs: Preparing for the Green Economy” and can summarize the outcome in three areas: promise, progress and potential.
Promise
Most agree that a green economy – and sustainable development more broadly – are society’s best hope for reconciling the world’s need for poverty-alleviating economic growth with the planet’s need for life-giving ecological vitality. And there is great promise in a green economy. Traditional industrial development has been incredibly wasteful of materials and energy. The typical coal-fired power plant, for example, loses over half the input energy as waste heat before the first electron zips out of the facility. To produce one ton of pharmaceutical pills requires over 100 tons of input materials, making a 99 percent waste rate on average. The good news is that we already have the know-how and technology to tackle most of this waste. What’s missing is a supportive economic, social and political context, along with trained and knowledgeable workforce to get the job done. Given the 9 percent unemployment rate in the U.S., the fact that dollar-for-dollar the green economy produces more jobs than traditional development makes it a no-brainer.
Progress
We have seen progress. The Commerce Department reports that there is already a $1 trillion green economy up and running in diverse business sectors like construction, recycling and forestry. Countries as different as China, Germany and India have shifted their policies and incentives to support and stimulate more green growth. Here in the U.S., there has also been bi-partisan support for environmentally friendly economic development. In 2007, for example, the Bush Administration included $125 million for green jobs in the Energy Bill. And last year, the Obama Administration made green jobs an important part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Some pundits, like The New York Times’ Tom Freidman, see the green economy as the next field of economic competition and are gaining the publics’ and politicians’ attention.
Potential
Despite the progress, it is clear that there is still vast untapped potential in the green economy. Official statistics show green business accounts for only about 1-2 percent of all economic activity. That’s a tiny sliver of the overall economic pie. But we know that this can grow rapidly. Germany, for example, was able to grow its green industries four fold in just a decade. Even business-as-usual projections show the green economy tripling to $3 trillion by 2020.
Our CGI discussion highlighted innovation and experimentation in building the green economy going on in such disparate places as the inner city New York, rural India and Native American reservations. Despite the apparent differences, the challenges are surprisingly similar: supportive policies; capable workforces; attractive business infrastructures; community support. The commonalities give optimism that shared learning might be able to accelerate green economic development and allow us to capture the potential that the green economy promises.
Cross-posted from Forbes

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

In the nine years since 9/11, more than 238 scientific studies and medical reports in peer review journals have tried to measure the impact of the dust, smoke and ash of the collapsed World Trade Center on the health of the thousands who were exposed to the contaminated clouds. Cumulatively, hundreds of millions of dollars have already been spent screening and treating tens of thousands of responders, volunteers, residents and downtown workers who breathed in the pulverized building materials and hazardous compounds released by the disaster.
Despite all that, what is known with absolute certainty about the dust and its impact is limited, especially when it comes to the questions that most concern everyone who breathed in the dust: will it cause cancer and lead to deaths? Medical investigators readily admit that for many reasons they don’t know the answers, and won’t know with certainty for years, if ever.
But the more that scientists hedge their bets by saying they don’t know, the less that elected officials seem able to say the same. In the face of uncertainty, they increasingly offer conclusions about complex medical mysteries, their false certitude keeping truth at a distance.
At a rally in Lower Manhattan earlier this month, Congressman Anthony Weiner urged passage of the James Zadroga bill (H.R. 847) to reopen the Sept. 11 Victim Compensation Fund and formally authorize long-term screening, monitoring and treatment programs for thousands of people exposed to 9/11 dust. “At least 900 people have died since September 11th, at least, from 9/11-related diseases,” Mr. Weiner stated. In so doing, he repeated the chilling 900-plus figure that Senator Kirsten Gillibrand included in a letter urging Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to bring the Zadroga bill up for a vote.
The problem is that no one — not the officials, or the advocates of the bill, nor the medical investigators — yet knows how many people have died because they breathed in the dust. The senator got the statistic about Ground Zero deaths from advocates of the bill, who acknowledge that they extracted it from an ongoing study of deaths by the New York State Department of Health.
But the department has made no such conclusions. State health officials say they know that at least 836 people who worked a day or more at ground zero during the cleanup have died, but the causes listed on their death certificates include traffic accidents, fires, military action (in Iraq and Afghanistan) and suicide, along with cancers and other diseases that may or may not be related to exposure. The overall number of people who toiled at the site could exceed 90,000, and without further information, the 836 deaths over nearly a decade, in itself, tells us little about what happened at ground zero.
“We recognize that people want answers,” said Kitty Gelberg, who heads the state’s mortality study, “but the data just isn’t there yet to provide answers that will satisfy them.”
Ms. Gelberg concedes that that’s not an easy message for people to accept, and that many have come to expect absolute certainty from science that science often simply cannot deliver.
Thanks to the work of Dr. Paul Lioy of the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute and others, we now know much more about the very fine particles in the dust. Asbestos, benzene and other known carcinogens were ground up in the complex mixture, but most of the dust was silica material from the pulverized concrete of the towers. Dr. Philip Landrigan of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, which has screened and treated more responders than any other institution, said the dust penetrated deep into airways, scarring delicate lung tissue, stiffening air passages and decreasing the breathing capacity of thousands of people We know that the concentration of dust in the air on 9/11 and for days afterward was so thick that the highly alkaline material — as corrosive as strong lye — burned throats and seared stomachs leading to severe acid reflux and recurring gastrointestinal disease. We know that many who witnessed the horrendous events of that day suffered post traumatic stress, which can have its own multiplying effect on a range of physical ailments.
But there is much more that we don’t yet know, which is small consolation for those who are sick. That uncertainty also is complicating the passage of the Zadroga bill as well as clouding the outcome of historic litigation by thousands of responders who are suing the city of New York in federal court.
None of the peer-review studies has yet made a case that cancers have increased. In fact, all three major study groups — the New York City Fire Department; the Mount Sinai Medical Center; and the World Trade Center Health Registry, the largest effort in U.S. history to track the health effects of a single event — have not yet come to any conclusions about cancer.
Nor has any study found that responders are dying at rates that would call attention to a particular illness or ailment.
The Zadroga bill is a response to the need for compassion to take the place of certainty. And it would also provide long-term funding for collecting data that can insure that we someday do have clear and conclusive answers. It is now expected to come up for a vote in the House before Congress goes home to campaign. The Senate will have to wait until the lame-duck session after the Nov. 2 mid-term election to consider the bill. For the sake of the responders, and to finally get to the truth, it is time for Congress to act.

Follow Anthony DePalma on Twitter:
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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

While there might be more noise in the social good space, there are also more tools to make giving easier and more accessible than ever. Many are also calling this a trend towards “democratizing social good.” The fact is, you don’t have to be a billionaire philanthropist to invoke a positive change in the world.
Whether you want to start a movement, do something to give back or just share your story — here are some great platforms that are enabling different ways for people to participate and make a difference.
1) SocialVest – Founded by Adam Ross, Socialvest marries shopping and giving together to make it easy for people to support their favorite causes by creating a fundraising channel out of everyday shopping. Then you can choose to donate the money you’ve accumulated to the charities or causes you care about and give the money you’ve earned through your SocialVest “Giving Account.” SocialVest also allows users to them promote their cause via social networking pushes and set up give groups and fundraising projects through social networking tools.
2) Causes – Co-Founded by Joe Green and Facebook’s Sean Parker, Causes is the app inside Facebook that lets people choose specifics causes to mobilize their friends for collective action, spread the word and/or raise money. Since 2007, the app has been used by a community of 125 million people and has had over $22 million donated through the application.
3) DonorsChoose – DonorsChoose is a platform that connects donors with classrooms in need. Go on the site, choose the project that interests you, donate, the site delivers the materials to the class and in turn the students will send you thank you notes and photos of the impact made.
4) MicroPlace – For as little as $20, you can open an investment account, use their search tools to find an investment on their site, pay with paypal or your bank account and then receive interest payments to make your money back. These Socially responsible investments in microfinance can alleviate global poverty helping the billion people who live on less than $1 per day.
5) Kiva – Kiva has been a prime of example of online micro-financing allowing people to give “loans that change lives.” As of September 19, 2010, Kiva has distributed $160,822,200 in loans from 757,183 lenders. A total of 220,977 loans have been funded. Make a loan for as little as $25 to one of their deserving entrepreneurs, follow their progress and get your money back too over time.
6) Vittana – Co-founder, Vishal Cakrabarti was named one of Huffington Post’s 2009 Gamechangers. With its motto “Students in school, one loan at a time,” Vittana uses person-to-person microlending of $1,000 or less to enable students to pay for their college education, highlighting “high-achieving, deserving” students in developing countries on its website in the hope that visitors might be inspired to help out.
7) KickStarter – Kickstarter is like a Groupon for raising money for projects. Powered by a unique all-or-nothing funding method, people can kickstart their project and goal by raising money through donations on the site. Projects must be fully-funded or no money changes hands.
8) CrowdRise – Co-founded by actor Ed Norton, Crowdrise allows you to raise money online for over 1.5 million charities with its personal fundraising pages, charity fundraisers, and internet tools.
9) Splashlife – Launched in September 2010, Splashlife describes itself as an AARP for millenials. Members can accumulate Splashlife points for doing social good — online and offline in-person volunteerism — which can then be used to get discounts off all sorts.

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Years ago, a friend took me shopping in the bazaars of the Barbs neighborhood of Paris, one of the city’s most diverse, where thousands of people — Algerians, Moroccans, Vietnamese, West Indians, West Africans and tourists — jostle to snare bargains in countless outdoor stalls, secondhand shops, and discount stores.
While browsing a rack of vintage leather jackets, I happened to look down at my purse, which had been zippered shut, and was shocked to find in it an arm, buried to the elbow. Looking up, I locked eyes with a young dark-haired girl, certainly no older than 14. She smiled sheepishly as if the say, “You got me,” but before I could even react she and the little girl who had been standing next to her were gone.
“Gypsies,” my friend warned. “You must always watch for them. They are beggars, thieves, and pickpockets — they teach their children to steal as soon as they are old enough to walk.”
The French disdain and open hostility toward the gypsies, also known as Roma, is nothing new, and belies France’s reputation as a stalwart of human rights with a history that goes all the way back to the French Revolution and the 1789 “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.”
In recent months, President Nicolas Sarkozy, in an attempt to gain the political support of the extreme right, has deported thousands of Roma, with the government paying 300 euros per adult, 100 euros per child to those who will leave voluntarily. Whether the Gypsies take the offer or not, the police demolish the Gypsies’ camps, their orders specifically instructing officers to target Roma. (Just imagine if the LAPD were to issue orders saying, “rout the Mexican squatters.”)
European Union Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding rightly drew the obvious parallel to policies of France’s wartime Vichy government when she threatened to bring action against France in the European Court of Justice, calling the French state’s current targeting of Roma for deportation a “disgrace.” The Vichy regime deported Jews and Gypsies to Nazi concentration camps.
Sarkozy took umbrage at the very suggestion that his government engages in ethnic based deportation policies, but the parallels to Vichy cannot be denied.
There can be no justification for treating the Roma any differently from other EU citizens. Specifically targeting them for expulsion clearly contravenes EU law and violates the most basic premises of the rule of law. Here, there is a bright line and it has been crossed.
That this policy is being perpetrated by Nicholas Sarkozy, himself the son of an immigrant, married to Carla Bruni, also an immigrant, adds a rueful irony to this human rights tragedy. That he is essentially playing politics is even more shameful.
Nearly one million striking workers gathered in cities throughout France last Thursday for the second day to voice their opposition to President Sarkozy’s plan to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62 and the full retirement benefits age from 65 to 67.
With 2012 elections looming large and his popularity waning, Sarkozy finds an easy target in the Roma. Cloaking his opportunism in tough-on-crime rhetoric, he willingly trades France’s international standing by pandering to the extreme right for a few measly votes. Because, let’s face it, the real punishment of any potential action in the European Court of Justice is not a fine, but the loss of standing for France, the self-described “mother of human rights” and country that will head the G20 in just a few short months.
The Roma community has long-standing problems with crime, child labor and child-prostitution. Disdain for people who do not educate their children and send them to the streets to beg and thieve is understandable. But these are matters for the coordinated efforts of police and courts and social workers – the approach taken for other communities — as opposed to broad-brush ethnic discrimination.
This is France, where the victims of Jim Crow could find haven. This is France, whose gift, the Statue of Liberty, has welcomed the “tired, poor… huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
But, now, with its controversial burqa ban and anti-Roma policies, France looks increasingly heavy-handed and intolerant. It no longer resembles the progressive society that proclaimed 221 years ago that, “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights.”

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

United States Senator Mary L. Landrieu, D-La., today gave testimony to the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling at its open meeting in Washington, DC. Landrieu’s testimony focused on the importance of a long-term coastal restoration plan for the Gulf Coast. Some proponents of the ban on off-shore drilling might say she did not go far enough in blaming big oil, but there is no doubt that the wetlands were in jeopardy long before the catastrophic explosion of the BP Macondo wellhead in April, loss of eleven lives and subsequent release of almost five million barrels of oil.
The critical problems facing Louisiana shorelines took center stage in Landrieu’s testimony. The Senator offered an important reminder that the wetlands of Louisiana have been in trouble for a long time. Five years ago Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Gustav and Ike issued a devastating wake-up call that what remains of the Mississippi Delta is a rapidly eroding landscape that loses 25 to 35 square miles of wetlands each year. “At the current rate of land loss, an area the size of Rhode Island will be lost by 2050,” Landrieu said. “I want to remind this commission that we’ve already lost the size of Delaware in the last 50 years. We don’t have a lot of time to get to the beginning of our restoration efforts.”
Landrieu did not mince words, blaming the federal government for malfeasance and mismanagement of a delicate ecosystem that has placed the Mississippi River Delta at “extreme risk of complete and utter collapse.”
At Risk Copyright Nienaber
Landrieu ticked off the damage: constant and debilitating land subsidence and sustained coastal erosion aggravated by hurricanes and storms that eviscerate barrier islands and coastal plains. The result is that an entire way of life has been under siege for far longer than the five months since the BP disaster. Landrieu drove home the importance of Louisiana to the rest of the nation, a nation that depends fully upon the shipping channels, the oil, and the resources of what seems to be a forgotten state and culture.
Landrieu reminded the panel that Gulf Coast states are the only oil producing states that don’t receive a portion of their severance in royalties. “Interior states have received them since 1927. The state of Wyoming got 50% of their oil revenues, they have 500,000 people. They’ve kept a billion dollars,” Landrieu said. “Louisiana produced four times the amount of oil and gas Wyoming has. We have 4.5 million people and we didn’t keep a penny.”
Louisiana has been “shortchanged,” by the federal government, Landrieu charged. “$165 billion has been taken out of the Gulf Coast since the 1950s when we started drilling. Very little of that money has come back to us.”
Landrieu recommended that Congress create a Gulf Coast Recovery Council to manage already dedicated Clean Water Funds and coordinate with the Natural Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA), a source of revenue that was fairly substantial under the Alaska-Valdez spill.
Mainstream media might also want to take note of the Dead Zone that has plagued the Gulf of Mexico well before the BP catastrophe. Largely ignored in the press, the Dead Zone is the result of the federal channelization of the Mississippi in order to promote transport. The Mississippi River, with its headwaters in northern Minnesota, drains two thirds of the continental United States. The waters flow 2,500 miles, and the affected area is surpassed only by the drainage basins of the Amazon and Congo. The Mississippi brings fertilizers and pesticides along with the silt-ridden currents, and these sediments are carried to the Gulf of Mexico where they are dispersed into the water. This problem has been decades in the making and cannot be attributed to the recent BP oil disaster.
Environmentalists will most likely unfairly attack Landrieu’s call to lift the moratorium on drilling, but they will be misguided. The current level of environmental scrutiny on drilling seems less than genuine when the Dead Zone has been ignored for decades, fish kills are a regular, yet under-reported occurrence, and wetlands have disappeared at an alarming rate without national attention.
Landrieu ended her testimony reminding the panel that the people of Louisiana are proud of their heritage and know their backyards better than anyone.

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

It hasn’t been an easy road to redemption for Kanye West. After snatching the microphone from sweet little Taylor Swift at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, the big, bad rapper was vilified by a nation.
That one Hennessey-inspired impulse to storm the stage, declare his love for Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” video, and interrupt the country singer’s acceptance speech nearly cost Kanye his career. His unapologetic, over-the-top antics often raise eyebrows, but this time it seemed he might have gone too far.
And, yes, what Kanye did was rude, petty, and downright unprofessional, but the backlash for it seemed extreme. Lady Gaga dropped him from her highly anticipated summer tour, his once-mainstream fan base seemed to dwindle to a few ardent defenders, and after profusely apologizing for his faux pas, Kanye all but disappeared in a self-imposed period of near exile from the public eye.
But now, one year later, he’s poised and ready for a triumphant comeback. By the time his album drops Nov. 16, the public’s faith and purchasing power will be restored in Kanye. It’s been a carefully orchestrated timeline of events that have led to the resurrection of Kanye’s public image.
In the immediate aftermath of Kanye’s VMA offense, he took to the media circuit, giving tear-filled apologies to Taylor, the fans, and even MTV. He tugged at our heartstrings talking to Jay Leno, choking up and being unable to speak when asked what his late mother would say about reprehensibly stealing another artist’s hard-earned spotlight.
But these apologies alone didn’t make up for our collective anger towards Kanye. He’d bullied America’s sweetheart, and we weren’t that quick to forgive and forget.
So brilliantly, Kanye and his people pulled him out of the public eye. For a man who loves attention, keeping a low profile couldn’t have been easy. But, alas, he did it.
By the time Kanye reemerged on Twitter in July 2010, joining the popular site some 10 months after his infamous VMA blunder, we were actually willing to listen to what he had to say. There was, in typical Kanye fashion, a lot of rambling and philosophical realizations about the mundane. And no stranger to the media circus, Kanye tweeted excessively about how sorry he was to Taylor Swift, garnering massive public attention. We were finally ready for Kanye to stir the pot and heat up the VMA controversy once again! Was he really sorry, or was this just another attention seeking, ego-boosting stunt?
Soon thereafter, we heard both Kanye and Taylor would be performing at the 2010 VMAs. We waited with bated breath. Would Kanye interrupt Taylor yet again? Would Taylor bust out her rap persona “T-Swizzle” and revengefully bash Kanye? Or, as my friend Kris suggested, would Taylor and Kanye come out together and collaborate on some country/hip-hop version of “I Got You, Babe?”
As adorable as that last option would’ve been, it didn’t happen. A demure-looking, barefoot Taylor sang a sweet melody about Kanye’s mistake, proclaiming Kanye, “still an innocent” and expressly forgiving him through her carefully crafted lyrics.
Kanye later closed out the show, emerging in a loud, red suit, beginning his song with a few delicately played notes on a keyboard. In his lyrics, quite different than Taylor’s but poignant nonetheless, he poked fun at himself. He rapped about the public, “putting up with [his] sh*t for way too long” then had a toast for, “the douchebags, assholes, scumbags… and jerkoffs.” Naturally, we were pretty sure Kanye included himself in that descriptive lineup.
It seemed, as Kanye took his final bow, that he’d paid his price. He’d apologized time and time again, Taylor herself had publicly forgiven him, and he acknowledged that he’d been, in words of President Barack Obama, “a jackass.” So one full year after Kanye had so royally ticked us off, we were finally ready to forgive him. By mocking himself, Kanye was on the verge of his new beginning.
Continuing the trend of joking at his own expense, Kanye appeared Sunday night on The Cleveland Show as aspiring local rapper, Kenny West. The show mimicked Kanye’s VMA incident with Kenny West telling Cleveland, “I still can’t believe Beyonce didn’t win!” It even went so far as to parody Kanye’s live televison, 2005 outburst of, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” Cleveland Brown stood alongside Kenny West saying, “Barack Obama doesn’t care about black people.” Only in the cartoon version, Kanye West’s alter-ego is in the know. “What the f*** were you thinking?!” He screams at the overzealous Cleveland Brown. We get it, now. Even Kanye’s aware that he all too often speaks before thinking.
So maybe now, finally, with the whole Kanye/Taylor-gate behind us, we, too, can officially move on. Kanye’s learned there are serious repercussions for thoughtless outbursts. Taylor’s learned about forgiveness, and also that sometimes a little heartbreak can boost your marketability. And the rest of us, well, maybe we’ve learned not to be so dead-set in our labels of victim and villain. We can support the Taylors and the Kanyes and appreciate them for their differences. After all, roles change, publicists convince, we forget and as Taylor sings, “today is never too late to be brand new.”

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In the past few weeks the media has been abuzz with stories about China’s currency manipulation. Given the stratospheric unemployment rate and bulging trade deficit, focusing on China’s questionable trade practices is long overdue.
Mercantilism. That’s the term for the policy path that China has been following. Mercantilism is the practice by which a nation “protects” its economy by doing everything it can to encourage exports and discourage imports. Essentially, it’s the inverse of American economic policy. Our policy is all about borrowing from the rest of the world to pay for imports from the rest of the world. While most of us are familiar with our policy of importing nearly everything thanks to any time spent at a Wal*Mart, we’re still unfamiliar with how China does business, so let’s take a closer look.
First, China encourages exports. They essentially subsidize the costs of production in a variety of forms. Their behavior ranges from a lump-sum cash payment to spur growth in an industry, giving big discounts on utilities or other raw material costs, discounted (or free) land/factories, large low-interest loans, etc.
Second, China actively discourages imports. They do everything they can to make it difficult or expensive for foreign companies to sell in China. Tariffs are the simplest way to do this: add a fee on top of any good being imported making it more expensive . Regulatory barriers are more common– complicated rules and laws are created to make it nearly impossible for foreign firms to comply with, with the intention of keeping them from market. Another common practice is forcing foreign companies to partner with a local firm or requiring technology transfers to develop a strong eventual Chinese competitor.
Currency manipulation lives above all of these policies. When a country’s currency is undervalued it makes their exported goods cheaper in the rest of the world while simultaneously making it more expensive for their citizens to buy foreign goods. It has the dual effect of boosting exports while shrinking imports.
The net effect of these policies has been a massive Chinese revolution. In just a few short decades, China has essentially become the factory to the world. Consequently scores of jobs have fled the US, consumers mounted a back-breaking debt load to cope with the broken employment market, and China’s ownership of our debt has allowed them to, at times, effectively dictate American policy.
China’s policies went from a brewing problem to that of a global crisis with their admittance to the WTO in 2001. Despite China’s fierce mercantilist policies, our leaders gave little concern for what the impact would be for American production and workers. As we focused on the “war on terror,” China found that they would get little, if any, pushback to their anti-US policies. Slowly the relationship found it’s equilibrium, starkly in the favor of China acting with impunity. While China built their production capabilities and raised the standard of living for millions, they simultaneously began financing the ever-growing massive amounts of money that Americans wanted to borrow. In a nutshell, as they laid the groundwork for the industries that would provide employment and wealth for the future, they also began to finance the American lifestyle.
Today China is both our largest supplier and creditor. We buy goods that we used to make from them, with money borrowed from them. But we shouldn’t pretend that the undervalued Chinese currency alone caused our current sad state of affairs — nor that it alone will fix it.
China chooses to invest their excess savings in American debt because each passing day only increases their leverage over us. Our position only grows weaker with each passing dollar and so our best chance is to work with the European Union, Japan and the rest of the world to confront these unfair practices.
Currency is just the tip of the China iceberg. We must recognize the current global war for capital and jobs that is being waged. A war that doesn’t deal in rockets or tanks but in factories and financial leverage. Recognizing this new reality will lead us to designing a system of tax, regulatory, educational, and trade policies that set us up for a real recovery and a long-term sound economy. If we don’t, our economy will remain on a course of full speed ahead for the Chinese iceberg.
This is the third in the series “A Business Plan for America” that will outline critical public policy proposals that are free of partisan politics, ideology and dead ideas. http://votechili.com/businessplan

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Stephen King just said on CNN Money that books themselves aren’t important since they’re basically just a delivery system for a story. But they’re much more than that: they’re a canvas. I know. I’ve been painting on mine for years.
It started in college when I first bought books that weren’t required reading. I’d already been highlighting textbook passages with yellow marker, and scrawling my name inside, so of course I wrote my name on the first page of these books, too. But I also put down the date of the purchase, the book store, a recent event, and who I was with at the time.
These scrawls sometimes proved amusingly opaque years later. Like: Great news on Wednesday. What about? Or: Argued with N. Who was N? And why were we arguing? Was it before I bought the book, after, was the book connected in some way? I’ve tried going back and comparing my journal at the time, but the cryptic notes don’t open up their secret to me. But more often the inscription refers to a lunch with a lover or friend, and the scene opens up for me in a whole new way.
Having known for a long time that I wanted to be a writer, once I started buying books as a matter of course, anything I read was also a subject of study. I underlined passages, circled words I didn’t know or wanted to use, bracketed or starred phrases worth remembering and quoting. Sometimes arrows would point to another page so I made sure I remembered a connection for later.
Great lines got the full treatment, and I’d note their pages in the front or back of the book, along with an identifying word or two, sometimes the whole phrase if it was memorable.
The more dedicated I became to writing as a career, the more the books I owned became a repository of ideas, notes, questions, descriptions of dreams inspired by the book, even short journal entries. It usually felt more immediate to keep the source of my inspiration and the idea closely connected. Some books have story titles, metaphors, character descriptions, opening lines written in the back or front — and even in-between. More than a few have whole scenes worked out.
My books are also unexpected time capsules. I’m always running out of bookmarks, so many older books have had receipts, notes, to-do list and even letters tucked into them.
Once I started reviewing for The Detroit Free Press and other newspapers and magazines in the early 1990s, the intensity of my entrance into each book deepened. Though I wrote drafts on my pc, I usually started the review somewhere inside the book unless I wanted to pass it on to a friend or relative later. Then I’d have to restrain myself, keep pencils and pens away from the book at hand. It wasn’t easy.
Biographies are a passion of mine, and whether I’m reviewing the book or not, they still seem to call out running commentary as I compare my life to the one I’m reading about. But I don’t tend to write much snark no matter what the genre, because if as book pisses me off that much, I’m not likely to finish it. I do correct typos now and then. I can’t resist.
Occasionally a book feels so much like a freight train car covered with graffiti that if I want to reread it, I just buy a new copy of the book. There it is, virginal, unmarked, waiting for me to dive right/write in. But I also keep the previous copy or copies because they form a small diary of my relationship to that text. I’ve just started reading books on my iPad, and while I enjoy the convenience and speed of downloading, I miss the physical interaction. Every book tells its own story, but the books in my library tell my stories as well.

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Shortly before the California Democratic primary in 2008, the San Fransisco Chronicle invited me to write a short article explaining why I, chair of the interfaith Network of Spiritual Progressives, was supporting Barack Obama. Like most other progressive activists, I understood that a president is limited in what s/he can accomplish in limiting the power of America’s economic and political elites and in restraining the military-industrial complex, the pharmaceutical and health care profiteers, the oil industry’s relentless destruction of the environment, or the selfishness and materialism that had become the hallmark of Wall Street and increasingly the “common sense” that was conveyed by the media and advertising into the consciousness of many Americans.
But what a president can do is to challenge the ideas of the powerful and rally those who have become aware that the current system is not only destructive to the future of the planet, but also to the possibility of constructing lives that have a sense of higher meaning than accumulating money and things, or building families and friendships that are about love and not dominated by the self-interest “what’s in it for me” consciousness of the capitalist marketplace.
President Obama is now traveling the country seeking to rebuild the enthusiasm he generated in 2008, and seems clueless as to why it is not there. And the Democrats who followed his lead seem similarly clueless. They imagine that we, their political base, must have had unreasonable expectations that somehow a Democratic majority in Congress and a Democratic president could overcome the Republican party of “no” and the powerful institutional constraints built up over many decades. So they try to explain to us why they failed to pass the legislation that we, their political base, would have wanted.
It’s easier to believe that their liberal and progressive base is nave than to acknowledge that we are not alienated for their failure to pass appropriate legislation, but for their failure to fight for such legislation. And our upset with Obama is not that he didn’t accomplish what he couldn’t accomplish, but that he didn’t do the one thing he could do: consistently speak the truth, tell us and the country what was really happening in the corridors of power and what the constraints are that he was facing.
It’s one thing to make compromises after you’ve struggled for something you believe in, another to make the compromises without ever trying. Liberals and progressives had already been deeply disillusioned after the Democratic sweep of Congress in 2006, continued to fund the war in Iraq despite overwhelming popular opposition to that war. So when Obama entered the primaries and spent much of his time distinguishing himself from Sen. Clinton on precisely the grounds that he had opposed the war from the beginning, he gave his base the impression that he would be a leader who would challenge the war makers. Similarly, when he challenged the selfishness and materialism that pervaded Wall Street, we felt we had a candidate who would be willing to speak truth to power.
So what happened? Massive bailouts for Wall Street while almost nothing for the millions of unemployed or those losing their homes to avaricious financial lenders; escalation of the war in Afghanistan and leaving 50,000 troops as “advisors” in Iraq; refusing to consider a “public option” for health care and supporting a plan that forces tens of millions of people to buy health insurance without putting any restraints on insurance companies’ continuing escalations of the amount we have to pay for health care; repression against immigrants; allowing continued drilling in the oceans for oil even after the Gulf disaster, and substituting the empty promise of “cap and trade” for the tax on carbons that is the only plausible way to reduce carbon emissions; refusal to punish those engaged in torture in the US intelligence community; and the list goes on.
The president has a bully pulpit that could have rallied the American public to an alternative worldview. Reagan did that while facing a hostile Democratic Congress; Roosevelt did that while facing a hostile Republican Congress-and that is what made them the most significant presidents of the 20th century.
Many of us will vote Democratic in November, despite all this. But don’t expect us to be able to rally others when the best we can say is that the Democrats and their national leader are better than the plausible alternatives. That is not a rallying cry likely to produce many votes or move us beyond our deep disappointments. And many others, feeling humiliated at allowing themselves to have opened to the hope Obama elicited, now find themselves either totally uninterested in politics or wishing to strike back at the Democrats for making fools of those who trusted. Obama and the Democrats remain clueless.
Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun Magazine and author of 11 books, most recently a national best-seller The Left Hand of God: Taking Back our Country from the Religious Right ( Harper, 2006).

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

On May 26, I was arrested at Chevron’s annual shareholder meeting. Chevron, a California-based company, held the meeting at its Houston office — the old Enron building.
On Thursday, my lawyer, and the lawyers of the four others arrested at the meeting, go to court in a preliminary hearing. Chevron has asked the Houston prosecutors for jail time.
Today, John Letzing of MarketWatch wrote what I believe to be a very important article: “Chevron throws book at shareholder activist.
Are criminal charges the best way to deal with a meeting disruption?” challenging the decision by Chevron to “throw the book” at one of its shareholders for the “crime” of voicing criticism at its annual shareholder meeting.
Letzing writes of the unusual choice by Chevron:
“Juhasz’s prosecution may result in an odd instance of a company having one of its stockholders incarcerated, and raises questions about the best way for firms to deal with activists who buy in, just to make a statement.
“‘This is very, very unusual,’ says Sanjai Bhagat, a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Leeds School of Business. ‘I’m a little puzzled as to why management would take such unusually strong steps.’”
“Boston University Prof. James Post said he can’t recall a similar case where a company pursued a shareholder activist with criminal charges, and for good reason: ‘A company almost never wins in a case like that.’”
The article has already received over 100 comments. While far too many focus on questioning my gender (I guess my short San Francisco hairdo doesn’t translate well across the nation!), most stay to the point, which, in most of the instances thus far, seems to be agreeing with Chevron.
There are important exceptions, including this one from “Larry Lynn,” who writes: “I have decided to have my family trust divest any Chevron/Standard stocks. Chevron/Standard is willing to compromise everything in order to enhance their bottom line. Halliburton had the courtesy to relocate to Dubai. If Chevron/Standard will not act in the intrest of the citizens of the United States, kick them out and shut them down.”
Your Comments Are Welcome!
Due to the constraints imposed upon me by the case, I cannot write about the case here. But you can learn much more on my websites: http://www.TyrannyofOil.org and http://www.GlobalExchange.org/chevron.

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We moms all know the dirty little secret of family vacations.
No, I’m not talking about the piles of laundry when we get home, though that’s certainly no fun. I’m talking about how moms whisper on the beach, on line at theme parks and at ski resort lifts that family vacations are really no vacations at all for them, especially when young kids are part of the equation.
Many moms joke they need a vacation after the vacation because just like at home, guess who more often than not is mediating squabbles, planning activities, navigating unfamiliar turf, keeping kids safe (and taking care of them when they’re sick), searching for that missing bathing suit top or mitten and that everyone has clean socks? (Whenever possible, go for a condo with a washer and drier).
And if your family are snow lovers like mine, there’s no vacation that requires more parental effort than a ski/snowboard trip — all the gear (the helmets, the long underwear, ski socks and mittens, not to mention skis, snowboards and boots), the logistics of ski and snowboard school (racing to get there on time, what to do when kids balk at going), the effects of the high altitude and my least favorite — getting off the plane and having to head straight to the grocery store so there’s food for that first breakfast.
These days, when every snow sports resort is courting the family market big time with special deals as well as activities (check www.takingthekids.com to see what’s going on around the country), Utah’s Park City Mountain Resort is going the extra mile for moms.
My daughter Reggie and me in Crested Butte, Co, during extreme ski competition in 2003. (Photo courtesy of Crested Butte Mountain Resort)
Spearheaded by Park City executive Krista Parry — a snow loving mom herself — the resort has launched www.snowmamas.com — a first for the industry — and a place where moms can trade tips (even recipes for easy, healthy aprs-ski dinners), share experiences and even vent their frustrations. Full disclosure: I was so taken with the idea that I signed on to help edit the website.
Now Park City Mountain Resort is looking for more Snowmamas and papas to join the inaugural group with a “Become a Snowmama” contest kicking off Sept. 28.
“The Resort is looking for snowmamas and snowpapas from around the country who are passionate and excited about family winter vacations and want to share their experience and insider tips,” says Parry. Entries will be accepted until midnight on October 15.
Yes, Park City is searching for snow papas too. Plenty of dads, of course, do their share and then some on vacation — including my own husband who likes nothing more than whipping up a big breakfast for the gang at a vacation ski condo and then chasing them down the mountain (long gone are the days when he led the way.)
“My husband is happy to take the lead in making sure the girls’ equipment and gear is appropriate and always is first on the scene when one of our girls has a wipeout,” says Linda Jager, a Snow Mama from Park City, Utah to two daughters.
It’s just that moms more often than not are the planners, the packers — and the worriers. “I think moms take on way too much and don’t delegate as much as we should,” suggests Amber Johnson, a snow mama from Denver and mom of two young children.
If you’re chosen, you’ll get a four-night/five day family vacation including lodging, airfare, ski and snowboard school, equipment, lift tickets and even lunch vouchers, $1000 and an all-expense-paid invite to the Snowmamas Summit in early December and another conference in early July (ski resorts are great summer vacation venues too).
Your job: Answer couple of “Ask a Snowmama” questions every week and write some posts about your experience during the season — not exactly a tough gig.
“To be able to share several hours on the mountain with my kids among amazing scenery and challenging ourselves…it’s what family vacation memories are made of,” says Jager.
“My fondest memories as a child were our ski vacations,” adds Amber Johnson. “I’m so grateful to be able to provide my kids with the same wonderful memories that were the foundation of my own childhood,” she says.
And that, after all, is why we’re going on vacation in the first place, suggests a new survey from the travel research firm Ypartnership. Nearly nine out of ten adults surveyed said they plan vacations to create memories and three quarters think back often to those memories (I’m guessing when the kids are being particularly difficult).
All the more reason to “Let yourself enjoy the small things like seeing your child accomplish something for the first time … It’s OK if everything isn’t perfect,” suggests Snow Mama Katja Presnal who lives in suburban New York and has three kids aged 10, 8 and 7. Moms, she adds, should take time for themselves too — on the slopes as well as off.
She discovered that first hand last season when she tackled her first-ever expert run at Park City Mountain Resort. “The feeling of accomplishment was huge,” she said. “We moms owe it to ourselves to test our limits and get that “I did it,” feeling, just like the kids.
That’s why I’ll go take a lesson rather than try to keep up with my gang. See, the drawback to all those years of schlepping the kids and their gear to the mountains, racing to ski school in the morning and back down the mountain to pick them up on time at the end of the day is that my three kids have become such experts at the sport that they love nothing better than jumping off cliffs or hiking to the toughest terrain they can find. That’s all way beyond my ability and what my bad knee can take. Two have competed. One daughter built a pair of bamboo-core skis for a high school science project — and skied on them in South America.
Yes, I’m proud to be a Snow Mama. I just don’t ski with my bunch beyond a couple of runs on blue-sky days anymore. “Love ya. Mom!” they say as they race out the door to get to the fresh powder.
I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Eileen Ogintz interviews families and experts around the world for her widely syndicated column Taking the Kids and is the creator of www.takingthekids.com She’s written seven family travel books most recently The Kid’s Guide; NYC and The Kid’s Guide: Cruising Alaska. For more Taking the Kids, visit www.takingthekids.com and also follow TakingTheKids on twitter and like us on Facebook, where Eileen welcomes your questions and comments.

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Maybe it’s the changing of the seasons, but there’s some serious nostalgia going on this week. A trio of aging rock dudes are getting reflective: Eric Clapton recalls the songs of his youth, Daniel Lanois helps Neil Young remember why he rocks, and Phil Collins shows his reverence for ’60s soul. Meanwhile, Mark Ronson pays his respects to the ’80s (and a few other decades), while Nick Hornby plays Bernie Taupin to Ben Folds’ Elton John.
WATCH: Check out this week’s must-play pick, Neil Young’s “Love and War.”
PLAY: Neil Young, “Le Noise”
Sonic architect Daniel Lanois has wanted to work with Neil Young for a long time. Both share a love of big sonic landscapes and beautiful noise. Lanois dragged Young off his ranch and locked the grunge godfather alone in his Silver Lake studio/home with just his guitars. The result is a man left with nothing but his thoughts of loss — being lulled by a loud six-string. “Le Noise” is raw, expansive, and vital.
WATCH the music video for the Neil Young single “Love and War.”
PLAY: Eric Clapton, “Clapton”
There are two sides to Eric Clapton: stadium rock guitar god and quiet acoustic guitar god. The latter shows up on “Clapton.” On this, his 19th solo studio album, the 65-year-old mixes up concert staples with childhood favorites. The expected acoustic blues are present (“Hard Times”), but so are a sampling of such 1940s pop standards as “Autumn Leaves.” Clapton says that he finds joy in looking back and discovering the classic songs to record. Mission accomplished. It’s a delight to hear an old master at home with bunch of comfortable songs.
WATCH Eric Clapton discuss the songs on “Clapton.”
SKIP: Phil Collins, “Going Back”
While Clapton is digging up old blues and standards, Phil Collins is getting sentimental over the Motown and soul songs of his youth. The Genesis drummer (who lost his ability to drum due a vertebrae injury) says that he didn’t want to add anything new these songs. So what’s the point, exactly? I’d choose the Motown originals over Phil Collins Motown karaoke.
WATCH the music video for the Phil Collins single “Going Back.”
PLAY: Ben Folds & Nick Hornby, “Lonely Avenue”
Nick Hornby’s novels kept Ben Folds company on his first tour of the UK, back in the ’90s. Years later, the two co-wrote a heart-aching song (“That’s Me Trying”) for WIlliam Shatner’s 2004 masterpiece, “Has Been.” Now the pair have teamed up for 11 tales of soul mates slipping away, the burden of hope, blind infatuation, and the trouble with Levi Johnston. If only all music was so smart and hummable.
WATCH Ben Folds and Nick Hornby explain working together on “Lonely Avenue.”
PLAY: Mark Ronson & the Business Intl., “Record Collection”
Mark Ronson’s solo output has been overshadowed in the U.S. by his production work (most notably, Amy Winehouse’s last stand, “Back to Black”). Hopefully, the commercial gods will smile on his third album. Who else could get the Dap Kings, D’Angelo, Simon Le Bon, and Ghostface Killah together in one room and have it make sense? Ronson’s “Record Collection” is a twisted, time-warped dancehall full of synthesized mash-ups that will make you dance and laugh out loud.
WATCH the Mark Ronson & the Business Intl.’s single “The Bike Song.”

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In the film The Social Network, writer Aaron Sorkin insinuates that one of the central drives in Mark Zuckerberg’s development of Facebook was the hot-blooded pursuit of women.
A little embarrassed, Zuckerberg denies this. And to counter the claim, he has publicly promised not to see the film. When he appeared on Oprah last week to announce a $100 million gift to the Newark public school system, the media queen cannily called the film “unauthorized.” It’s a refrain Zuckerberg has repeated for months now.
“I started Facebook to improve the world and make it a more transparent place,” he told TheWrap.com’s Sharon Waxman in July at a media conference in Sun Valley.
“This movie portrays me as someone who built Facebook so I could meet girls.”
Much is being made of the filmmaking ethics that allow Hollywood to create a character out of Zuckerberg, who is still only in his twenties, and who will soon become internationally famous according to Aaron Sorkin’s rendering of him — Sorkin’s Zuckerberg is complex and sympathetic, but unflattering.
“It’s a new kind of license to turn a real-life 26-year-old whose most life changing decisions were made as a teenager into an incarnation of Silicon Valley killer instinct, undergrad dorkdom, impatient brilliance, and middle-class Jewish-American aspiration fighting the Wasp Establishment,” New York Magazine’s Mark Harris wrote about the film. “Sorkin’s version of Zuckerberg is a young man pounding on the door, driven by his desire to get in” — to places of power and acceptance — but also, “away from the Jewish fraternity that symbolizes his lack of access to the inner circle.”
Let’s assume for a moment that Sorkin’s version of Zuckerberg contains some strand of truth. And that there was a time when a brilliant, geeky Harvard student hopelessly fantasized about sex, just not with a Jewish girl.
In one of the film’s early scenes, Zuckerberg and friends are partying at the Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi, on “Caribbean Night,” when they observe a group of Asian-American young women dancing in a cluster.
“There’s an algorithm for the connection between Jewish guys and Asian girls,” one of Zuckerberg’s friends says wryly. “They’re hot, smart, not Jewish and can dance.”
Sorkin would have us believe that in the eyes of some Jewish men — or at least, you know, those run-of-the-mill Harvard scholars — one of the best things about being an Asian woman is that she isn’t a Jewish woman. If this were pure fiction, it might sting a little less, but unfortunately it isn’t: Zuckerberg, who might be the most eligible Jewish bachelor in the world met his current girlfriend, Chinese-American medical student Priscilla Chan on erev Shabbat at an AEPi party during his sophomore year.
In a single sentence in a recent New Yorker profile of Zuckerberg, one of the few in-depth interviews he has ever conducted, writer Jose Antonio Vargas shattered the hopes of single Jewish women everywhere and gave the Jewish world yet another reason to fret over the its future by suggesting Zuckerberg is on the road to intermarriage.
“Friends expect Chan and Zuckerberg to marry,” Vargas wrote in the Sept. 20, 2010 issue. He also noted that the couple moved in together in early September — which Zuckerberg announced on his Facebook page, of course, — and that they will vacation together in China this winter, a trip Zuckerberg is preparing for by learning Mandarin.
But ladies, don’t pin your hopes on the word “expect” just yet. Because there is a more sinister undercurrent to the film’s assumption that for some Jewish men, and perhaps Mark Zuckerberg, being a Jewish woman is a turn-off.
Last year, during an interview with young, newcomer producers Gabe and Alan Polsky, who produced Werner Herzog’s remake of The Bad Lieutenant and are the heirs to an energy fortune, the question of whether or not they would marry within the tribe was met with vexation and displeasure.
“I don’t even want to breach that [topic],” Alan Polsky said hastily. “I don’t want to get into that question; I’m not going to say anything.” “And,” he added, turning towards his brother, “I don’t think you should either.”
Too late.
“I’ll tell you what,” Gabe explained, “Jewish girls were very difficult growing up…”
“Where we grew up, they were very spoiled,” Alan conceded.
They said the Jewish girls they knew were “clique-y.”
“Very clique-y,” Alan said. But he admitted that coming from immigrant parents, they often felt out of place. “So I think we have a tendency to be overly skeptical.”
Phew, because, read another way, their remarks could be seen as an indictment of the Jewish woman nobody likes: the whiny, spoiled, entitled, high-maintenance, overly-dependent-on-her-parents Jewish American Princess, or “JAP.” We’ve all met her; the overindulged sorority girl who drives a more expensive car than most working adults and tends to start conversations by commenting on the brand of your handbag or asking if those are seriously the new Tory Burch shoes.
If college-age Jewish girls are doomed to the JAP stereotype, adult Jewish women face another: the smart/strong duality that inevitably leads to The Jewish Mother. And that stereotype comes with another set of flattering adjectives like domineering, overbearing, controlling and smothering, but cannot exist without its equal and opposite: the weak, silent Jewish male. All of these, obviously, are egregiously unfair — alright, except for the overbearing Jewish mother part — but they do exist in the culture, and the notion is front and center in The Social Network.
In the film’s memorable opening scene, the exquisitely articulate young woman whom Zuckerberg is dating dumps him after he insults her in a million different ways. He retaliates, on his blog, with a dig about how her family changed their name from “Albright” to “Albrecht”.
If all Jewish women were JAPs, it makes sense why someone like Zuckerberg, who in real-life is known for his modest lifestyle and disinterest in wealth — and in the film, his resentment of privilege — wouldn’t want to tie the knot with a Jewish girl. Zuckerberg is more interested in changing the world than possessing it.
Which sounds like some Jewish women I know. In fact, you don’t have to look far to find Jewish women who are at the top of any number of fields to realize just how wrong the JAP stereotype is: Anne Frank, Golda Meir, Madeline Albright, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, Ayn Rand, Natalie Portman, Rachel Weisz, Elizabeth Taylor, Queen Esther… the list goes on and on. Which leads me to believe that it isn’t Jewish women that are the problem. It’s that Jewish men like Mark Zuckerberg and Aaron Sorkin are hanging out with the wrong ones.
Read more on Mark Zuckerberg at Hollywood Jew

Follow Danielle Berrin on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/hollywoodjew

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Conventional wisdom in Washington, DC is that with the news of Christine O’Donnell’s victory in the Republican primary in Delaware that things are looking up for Sharron Angle, the Republican candidate vying to remove four-term Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid from his perch in Washington. Reid is about as disliked in Nevada as any politician in the state’s history. In the rural areas of the state, in particular, signs abound reading “Elect Anyone Butt Harry Reid”. But the same independent streak that helped propel Reid to office and has grown markedly since then may keep him in Washington and prevent Angle from winning. Those who dispense conventional wisdom in Washington just don’t understand that Nevadans aren’t happy with their current choices for representation in the Senate.
Nevada is now 21% registered “Independent” or “No Affiliation.” Registered Democrats number approximately 43% of the electorate and Republicans account for about 37%. All of those figures have shifted a bit since the last general election given Nevada is now shrinking rather than growing at its once 10% a month growth rate.
Sadly, Harry Reid and his political team know these figures county by county from the least populated (Esmeralda County’s 300 votes) to his home county of Clark where the money flows and Harry likes to hob-knob with the Democratic party elite. Reid benefits from the fact that Nevada is one of a very few states where “None of the Above” is one of the ballot choices. Reid is well aware that he will never change the minds of conservative Democrats or Tea Party Independents and actually get their vote; those who dislike Reid dislike him intensely. So Reid has embarked on a very shrewd tactical play: define Sharron Angle as just “extreme” enough to move Independent voters into the “None of the Above” column. Reid doesn’t expect to win their support – indeed those votes are out of his reach. Reid’s strategy is to convince people Angle shouldn’t get their vote, either. Angle should worry. Nevada has a history of this type of independent behavior.
In 2004, a self-proclaimed “socially conservative” Republican, Richard Ziser, lost to Reid 65% to 35%. The bad news for Angle is that in 8 of 17 Nevada counties, the “None of the Above” box got more votes than the Republican that year. And this is precisely what Reid is playing for this November. Paint Sharron Angle as enough of a question that “…even if you hate me, don’t vote for her…” The Republican Party in Nevada and in Washington, DC must counter-attack and inform Nevada voters that a vote for “None of the Above” is, by simple math, a vote for Reid.
While Angle has put forth controversial stances, she is better than Reid who personifies big government. Angle will work to reduce the size of government and the debt-financing to which Washington is addicted. After 24 years of watching Reid spend our nation into poverty, Nevadans needs to fire him.
Reid has been a failure far beyond Nevada but in the Silver State, his legacy is the highest reported unemployment rate approaching 15% and a “U6″ unemployment figure in excess of 20%. There are more under-employed and jobless Americans in Reid’s home state and home county than anywhere in America. Business formation has slowed to a trickle in Nevada, as small- and medium-sized companies begin to struggle with the questions of how they will afford the mandated Obama-care requirements, which Harry Reid led through Congress. Reid has also been remarkably effective at killing job-creating projects, including Yucca Mountain’s nuclear materials repository, coal fired power plants in White Pine County, and a long list of other projects disliked by Reid’s ultra-left progressive base.
Undecided voters or Nevadans that dislike both candidates must come to grips with their choice: either Reid or Angle will be the next U.S. Senator from Nevada and voting “None of the Above” may make you feel better but will mathematically insure Reid wins.
So I pose this question to my fellow Nevadans: even if you think Angle doesn’t represent your views on some issues, would you rather have six years of the possibility that Sharron Angle will stay true to her colors of small government or six more years of Harry Reid’s vision of an America run from Washington? Harry is hoping those of you who don’t like him pick “None of the Above”.
John Chachas is a former investment banker at Lazard who ran as a Republican in the Nevada U.S. Senate primary on June 8th.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

The 2010 elections will prove to be a watershed of extravagant campaign spending, and how much is too much in the eyes of American voters. While the Citizens United decision has allowed unlimited anonymous campaign spending by businesses, this unprecedented ruling by the Supreme Court has incited citizens nationwide to take back our elections from the highest bidder.
In a sobering election year based on economic hardships, many candidates stressing their financial responsibility appear at odds with the way manage their campaigns, characterized by lavish spending with short-sighted goals. Worse still, while candidates and incumbents are now going out to their constituents to assure they will fight corporate America, most of them have already taken corporate America’s money.
The reality of campaigns today is that there is never enough money to get your message out enough — even to drown out your opponent’s message by buying up outlets your opponent would otherwise purchase.
But in Ohio, I came across a candidate for Congress who has pledged a Clean Money campaign by taking no money from corporations, special interests, or PACs, Political Action Committees — only one of two Congressional candidates to do so. Surya Yalamanchili — or simply, “Chili” — showed me how he has managed a streamlined campaign depending on individual donors while proving his moxie as a public servant by running his own show.
Chili was inspired to run by the hardships he has seen Ohio face, and believes that getting to Congress is a way to help his state. Chili believes that since it is the big money influence in Congress that has crippled our country, someone outside of that racket has to get there to be able to challenge it.
And to get that shot, Chili showed me the hustle he puts in. If Cincinnati native Pete Rose of the Cincinnati Reds was famously nicknamed “Charlie Hustle” for his tireless effort, Surya could surely be known has “Chili Hustle” for the legwork he does in the name of running a Clean Money campaign.
Here is a short about the grind of a political newcomer, pounding the pavement and showing where the money goes “when you can’t pay to play with the big boys, but you still want to play.”
This footage is from my documentary currently in production, PAY 2 PLAY: Democracy’s High Stakes, which explores the Citizens United decision and shows how awesome campaign reform will be.
Surya “Chili” Yalamanchili is running as the Democratic nominee for the U.S. House of Representatives in Ohio’s 2nd District, against the Republican incumbent, U.S. Rep. Jean Schmidt. No endorsement is implied by this expos on shoestring campaigning.
www.johnennis.tv
www.pay2play.tv

Follow John Wellington Ennis on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/johnennis

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

You met the love of your life. (Again) Time to text. But what?
“How are you?”
“Nice to meet you?”
Yes, show them you have the personality of a Kansas zip code.
You start typing and… BRAIN FART! You can’t think of anything clever! You’re as nervous as Paris Hilton on Jeopardy. You’re shaking like a martini. You get “texter’s block.” You don’t know what to do.
Relax, here are my top ten flirty text messages you can send to your future ex-wife or husband. Not all of these funny text messages are instant, out-of-the-box, copy-paste-and-send creatures — you’ll have to modify them to your situation. But even if you can’t use them as is (or at all) they’ll help ignite ideas.
Whether you’re texting a girl or a guy, always be mindful of how they’re feeling about you. At the risk of stating the obvious, you shouldn’t send a flirty text to somebody who’s demonstrably lukewarm to you. They’ll shut you down faster than a unionized WalMart.
The 10 best flirty texts below are taken from my private collection (yes, I collect them the way other people collect stamps) and they’re intended for people who are so hot for you they can hear the hiss when they think of you.
You: Stop!
Likely Reply: Stop what?
You: Stop thinking about me. See, you’re doing it… right… now.
I could drink a case of you and still be on my feet.
You: 192y – (62*84) = 12x + 45y solve for x and then graph
Likely Reply: ???
You: You make me harder than algebra.
You’re so beautiful that last night you made me forget my pickup line.
I’ve never seen such dark eyes with so much light in them.
I think we should just be friends with sexual tension.
Whenever I see you I feel like a dog dying to get out of the car.
If I’d have held you any closer I’d be in back of you.
I wish I were on Facebook so I could poke you.
I want you like JFK wanted a car with a roof.
Mike Alvear is the author of The Flirty Text Message Helper: Witty Texts For Clever People, available for instant download at www.flirtytextmessagehelper.com/ebook .

Follow Mike Alvear on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/mikealvear

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

As a proxy for our friend, the generic “Judy Consumer”, I had the rare chance to experience in person the Clinton Global Initiative (September 21 – 24) as “Judy Consumer” might. Never having been so close to so many high level politicians and world leaders, it was exciting (somewhat dizzying) to be a part of this global event. It was awe-inspiring to know that this collection of business leaders, sustainability experts, diplomats, politicians, and celebs were all talking about one simple thing — what can we do to make a difference to someone, somewhere in our wide world.
It was inspiring to understand how the power of the Clinton Global Initiative was that it provided a “platform” where these initiatives can go from concept to the concrete. During the course of four days I got to see how much energy and commitment were focused on a myriad of problems ranging in scope around four key initiative themes: Empowering girls and women, harnessing human potential, strengthening economies and technology enablement. These four themes were the organizing format at the “CGI Exchange” — an exhibition hall filled with lots of small and large companies that have taken one issue and are working to solve it. I saw one small company create “a water wheel,” easing the burden of traditional water carrying jugs world over. Or Internews, another company, working to train local journalists in developing countries. And there were courageous efforts to reduce plastics pollution, reconnect the 43 million refugees who are separated from their families and expand access to education in a variety of programs.
It was moving to see such a wealth of human commitment. But what kept nagging at me was while these efforts were heroic and noble — the need seemed overwhelming. My spirit wanted to hang on to the optimism of these passionate people but my intellect reeled from the seemingly hopelessness of it all.
That question kept pressing on my mind throughout the rest of the conference even up to the final closing session. This was a grand slam sort of session, featuring heavy weight speakers including President Obama, Michelle Obama (who spoke compellingly about the opportunity to better harness the amazing human potential of our veterans and their families) and Bill Gates along with a high profile set of celebs including Barbra Streisand, Mick Jagger and Geena Davis.
Then, startlingly, in the final official moments of the event, it was President Clinton who himself seemed to sense the question that hung over my head and probably many others as well, which, he put far more bluntly than I had whispered in my own head: “I wonder if we are all fools to be optimists … it’s so easy to look at the negative.”
The question seemed impossible to answer and I was in no mood to be played with since I had already been on my feet for over 90 minutes (the press corp are not given such amenities as chairs, except for use by photographers). Irritatingly at first, it seemed like President Clinton was taking an oratory detour, going on about some recent discoveries within the subatomic world — not addressing the question at all.
Then, living up to his well earned talent at keeping an audience engaged, he came back to the salient point with a mischievous glee in his voice. He explained how in the subatomic world, scientists were surprised to learn that contrary to their expectations that there would be a perfect balance between all positive and negative particles, it seems that: “the positive particles were slightly more numerous within each atom than the negative particles.” He continued; “You don’t have to think life is perfect, but all this is worthwhile because … the positive elements are slightly more numerous than the negative ones.”
It’s wonderfully reassuring to know it is in our very physical being to be optimists. It’s inspiring to know that all the efforts of all the Judy Consumers out there reflect who we really are — born to be optimists.

Follow Judy Shapiro on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/judyshapiro

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Cross-posted from The Economist
I want to be the first to advocate the ignorance-based economy. Exhortations by public officials everywhere to build knowledge-based economies have skyrocketed in popularity since the OECD first published its manifesto in 1996, accruing a whopping 40,000 articles on Google scholar alone. Unfortunately, like many sound bites, this one has more flavor than nutrition. As I help societies around the world increase their levels of entrepreneurship, I’ve found the “knowledge-based economy” mantra, ubiquitous as it is among public leaders everywhere, has become empty for three reasons.
All economic activity is knowledge-based. Today, in 2010, what isn’t? The term’s original intention was to describe an alternative to economic activity based on resource extraction, commodity sales and rent-seeking. However, these activities also require and generate tremendous amounts of knowledge. Today, diamond sales require complex regulations and tracking processes, oil production must rapidly invent unique solutions to unforeseen problems, and cement pricing and distribution must be optimized with complex algorithms. Knowledge infuses all economic activity everywhere, and when something is everything, it is nothing.
Internet is a utility; information is a commodity. The phenomenal accessibility to information through the worldwide web and wireless communication was and is one of the implicit underpinnings of the knowledge-based economy concept. A Google of “web” yields 2.5 billion hits in .27 seconds, and when combined with “Internet”, 1.5 billion in .25 seconds. There are about 5 billion mobile phone users engaged in borderless texting and other interactions. Facebook is a large country and Google is a common verb. But the ubiquity of access to information means that if you need to tell someone that they should use the web for their business, one of you is over 60, and the other is Rip Van Winkle.
Entrepreneurship is the scarce and valuable resource, not knowledge. Recently I reviewed a list of a university’s patents up for licensing, and saw that such an effort is near-useless. The connection between molecules and money is incredibly loose and divorced from entrepreneurial drive. In other words, advanced knowledge has little economic value. I grew up in Woods Hole Mass., with its 925 residents and 54 affiliated Nobel Laureates.
Entrepreneurship? None. Spin-off ventures? None. Most regions would die for a tiny fraction of the IP that gets generated in Woods Hole, but Woods Hole has remained an economic anti-cluster since its founding in 1888. Venture capitalists invest in 1 out of 100 brilliant ideas they review. Technology is not what gets you to the top; business acumen, leadership ability, salesmanship, and the ability to put resources together is what realizes opportunity. Compared to technology, entrepreneurship is the scarce and valuable resource.
The Bliss of Ignorance
The interesting, value-adding aspects of economic activity are the ones that are based on ignorance, not knowledge. It is the ability and willingness to take action in the face of fundamental ignorance, in which uncertainty, ambiguity, and the unknown play dominant roles that will determine which economies, and ventures, succeed and fail. Good managers, leaders, and policy makers have evolved effective ways of dealing with such ignorance. Successful entrepreneurs have led the way in turning ignorance into opportunity; we can learn much from their behaviors. Entrepreneurs enter into the unknown, sometimes plunging headlong, more often than not creeping into it, toe after toe. Tom Szaky, for example, built an international “green” business, Terracycle, ignorant of the required technology for converting worm excrement into fertilizer. He was completely nave to the ways to package and sell the product, not to mention finance his early investments. He learned by doing: by jumping in, by making small mistakes and a few big ones, and by using his native intelligence and scrappiness to invent solutions as unexpected opportunities and problems arose. Slowly, the landscape became clear. Szaky not only discovered the nature of this particular economic environment, but he also invented the environment.
This is the way that in reality most entrepreneurs, those quintessential economic actors, work. In the past I have called this methodology, of handling ignorance by acting in the face of it, “strategic opportunism.” At Babson College, we term it “entrepreneurial thought and action.” And at the heart of this ignorance-based economy are those economic actors who learn by doing. They embrace the learning embedded in surprise, make mistakes, improve optionality as they go along, and reframe and restructure risky situations to be less risky, in part by partnering with others who will take on some of the risk. The economic well-being of today’s societies rests in encouraging entrepreneurs and fomenting their ability to deal with ignorance. If information is a commodity, is it really necessary to convince people that thinking in novel, innovative ways can lead to economic opportunity and growth? Is it necessary to persuade policy makers that investing in education and thinking is worthwhile? In 1996 a call to build the knowledge-based economy may have made sense. Not in 2010.

Follow Daniel Isenberg on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/danisen

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

In Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article, “Small Change: Why The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted,” he argues that “strong-tie” relationships — relationships among people with a pre-existing high level of personal connection to each other — are necessary to any serious activist project. Because online organizing builds on “weak-tie” relationships, he suggests, the world of Twitter and Facebook is unsuited to substantial, world-changing activism.
The centerpiece of Gladwell’s essay is his retelling of the story of the lunch counter sit-ins of 1960. He is right to note that the first sit-in sprung from the strong-tie friendships among its student organizers and that the work of established activists throughout the South did much to facilitate the growth of the campaign in the weeks and months that followed. But he neglects the role that pre-internet social networking — ad hoc communication among college students connected through fraternities and sororities, loose friendship clusters, student governments, or just shared hang-out spaces — played in spreading the word and building the movement.
And if you’re looking for weak-tie organizing in the activism of the sixties, the Civil Rights Movement — church-led, small-town-based, building on the preparatory work of decades of communal struggle — is the wrong place to start, anyway. The right place to start is the mostly-white student movement centered on Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).
Where SNCC, a main student-led civil rights group of the 1960s, emerged as a “beloved community” of organizers bound by the strongest of strong ties, and struggled after it outgrew that intimacy, SDS achieved its greatest success as a loose confederation of far-flung chapters. In SDS’s heyday its members shared no one ideology, no strong bonds of personal connection, no uniformity of tactics or strategy. What they shared was a sense of being part of a movement, of something called SDS.
SDS never had a particularly large staff, but it did have a few organizers that it would send out into the field. These staffers would check the organization’s records, figure out where there were clutches of members who might need help or opportunities to build new chapters where none existed, and hit the road.
And when they did, they would regularly make strange discoveries. They’d arrive on a campus that they thought would be a good candidate for chapter-building, find a couple of likely activists, start making their pitch, and get a quizzical look in return. “If you folks are from SDS, you should really be talking to Janice and Stanley. They’re the co-chairs of our SDS group. Have been for a couple of years now.”
Local SDS chapters were forged out of strong-tie bonds, of course, but that’s not how the group spread on the national level. On the national level, students would read about SDS in Newsweek, or hear about it in a letter from a friend, or see a rally on TV, and think “we should do that here.” And then they would, and a lot of time they wouldn’t bother to send in membership dues, show up at national conferences, or file a charter with the main office. They’d just do their thing.
SDS wasn’t so much a national organization as a national idea.
Gladwell’s primary examples of contemporary online organizing — Iran, Darfur — are ones in which the barriers to Westerners moving beyond low-level involvement are extraordinarily high. Other than putting a badge on our Twitter icons or donating a few bucks to Doctors Without Borders, there’s really not much that most of us can do about a political crisis halfway around the world. And so our organizing on those issues is going to be haphazard and short-lived.
In taking these crises as his model, though, Gladwell adopts an all-or-nothing approach to the question of whether activism is “serious.” If you’re not sitting in at a lunch counter, he suggests, or on the ground in Tehran, you’re not doing much of anything. But another of his own examples reveals the poverty of that binary conception.
A few years ago, Gladwell notes, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur was diagnosed with leukemia, and discovered that because his ethnic group — South Asians — was underrepresented in the national bone marrow registry, there was no suitable match for him on file. His business partner launched an internet campaign to recruit South Asians to the registry, one that ultimately added 24,000 people to the list.
Gladwell cites this as an example of an effort that got people to sign up “by not asking too much of them,” and on one level, that’s correct. It takes minimal effort to click over to a website and type in your address, and not much more to swab your cheek and return the kit they send you.
It’s easy — but most people still don’t bother. Most folks need a goad. And if that’s all this had been, a goad to get people to do something easy and important, it would have been great.
It was quite a bit more than that, though, because actually donating bone marrow isn’t easy. It involves a doctor drilling a hole into your pelvis. It’s usually done under general anesthetic. The pain can persist for several weeks. And in a not-insignificant number of cases, serious complications result.
Yes, of course, it’s easy — or at least easy-ish — to get someone to fill out a web form, and yes, of course, online communities do an excellent job encouraging that kind of low-cost “activism.” But as every true activist knows, that first contact with a like-minded soul is the beginning of the process, not the end. And so it turns out that of the thousands of people who joined the registry as a result of this campaign, several hundred have already gone through the real sacrifice of donating marrow. All in hopes of saving a stranger’s life. All as a result of a social media campaign.
And yet this phenomenon is offered as evidence of the triviality of online organizing.
Gladwell is right that strong-tie relationships were a crucial part of the Civil Rights Movement, and is a crucial part of any organizing effort. But he misses the fact that all strong ties start as weak ties, and that even weak-tie relationships can spur action within and between strong-tie communities.
The best internet-age example of this that I know of is one that Gladwell doesn’t mention at all. In 2009, California’s college students were reeling from the effects of state budget cuts. Their tuition had been raised by fifty percent in just two years. Class sizes were growing, course offerings were shrinking, enrollment was being cut. Students were being locked out of courses they needed to graduate. All while administrative expenses continued to mushroom.
And so they rebelled.
On the first day of fall classes ten thousand students protested across the University of California. In the weeks that followed, activists sat in. They phone banked. They marched on the state Capitol. They took over campus buildings across the state. Hundreds were arrested, others were tased and pepper-sprayed and beaten.
And students across the country watched from afar. When California activists called a statewide day of action for March 4, 2010, students from across the country embraced the call. Organizing primarily through Twitter, Facebook, and email listserves, activists who had never met face-to-face spread the word.
By March 4, activists on well over a hundred campuses in more than thirty states had been mobilized. They held rallies and teach-ins, marches and panel discussions. For the most part, those events were mounted by students building on prior local strong-tie relationships, but social media was what spurred them to act and then co-ordinated their efforts.
The American student movement of the 1960s wasn’t directed by any national body. It wasn’t, in the main, financed or facilitated by pre-existing groups. It was built at the grass roots by students who stood up when they saw their fellow activists on television or in the papers, or received newsletters from national organizations and letters from friends at distant campuses. It was a movement sparked by social networking, and it was a movement that transformed the campus and the nation.
And now, with the help of contemporary social media, a new generation of campus activists is doing it again.
Cross-posted on StudentActivism.net

Follow Angus Johnston on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/studentactivism

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

A struggling US restaurateur who was subjected to harsh criticism by TV chef Gordon Ramsay has died after jumping from a bridge, officials said.
The body of Joseph Cerniglia was found in the Hudson River off New York on Friday, officials confirmed.
In 2007, Cerniglia said on Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares that his Italian eatery was indebted and near bankruptcy.
Ramsay questioned his business acumen and panned the restaurant.
Officials said Cerniglia, 39, leapt from the George Washington bridge spanning the Hudson river between New York's Manhattan borough and the state of New Jersey and have ruled the death a suicide.
In 2007, Cerniglia said on Ramsay's show his restaurant Campania in the state of New Jersey was in “overwhelming” debt and the dire situation threatened his wife and children.
Mr Ramsay asked why he had become a restaurateur if “you haven't a clue how to run a business”.
On Tuesday, Mr Ramsay was quoted by the Press Association as saying: “I was fortunate to spend time with Joe during the first season of Kitchen Nightmares.
“Joe was a brilliant chef, and our thoughts go out to his family, friends and staff.”

Source:BBC

In the style of “Mad” magazine, it’s the season of con vs. con at the Securities and Exchange Commission — only no one’s laughing.
Word on the inside is that the Commission covered up — or at least ignored — an investigation of billionaire R. Allen Stanford, who is awaiting trial in a Texas jail on 21 criminal charges that his Antiguan bank allegedly sold questionable certificates of deposit with “improbably high” interest rates and was running a Ponzi scheme at the same time.
“They didn’t call him ‘Agile Allen’ for nothing,” according to a source familiar with the case.
The SEC apparently wasn’t nearly so agile.
A report by SEC Inspector General H. David Kotz claims the SEC was aware Stanford was running a $7 billion Ponzi scheme as far back as 1997, but waited until late 2005 to step in. The Commission filed civil charges in the case in February 2009.
Kotz noted that the Commission filed civil fraud charges against Goldman Sachs last April, on the same day it released his report critical of the Stanford investigation. The timing of the Goldman filing is “suspicious,” said Kotz, who went on to suggest that the Goldman charges diverted attention from the report of the botched Stanford probe.
The inspector general said the timing of the two actions in April “strains credulity.” Kotz made his suspicions public at a September 22 congressional hearing on the Stanford investigation before Senate Banking Committee.
Republican sources in Washington claimed the SEC made Goldman the poster boy for greed as a cover for the Stanford investigative foul up. These sources also suspect Goldman was sued to help boost support for the new regulatory reforms governing Wall Street’s occasionally bad behavior.
Though SEC denies the Goldman announcement was a cover-up of the Stanford probe, Kotz wondered out loud if in fact the timing might have been politically motivated.
Republican speculation aside, Mr. Kotz told the committee that top officials at the SEC’s Fort Worth office were “being judged on the numbers of cases they brought, so-called ‘stats’,” the obvious and easy cases. “Complex cases were disfavored,” Mr. Kotz explained, because they were not “slam dunks.” Mr. Allen’s case is a rat’s nest of allegations including, but hardly limited to, the purchase of a Caribbean island. In other words, it didn’t add up as a “stat” or “quick hit” case.
Robert Khuzami, director of SEC’s Enforcement Division, and Carlo di Florio, director of the Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations, said they are moving to implement the reforms demanded by Mr. Kotz.
Mr. Khuzami said he was alerting what he called “rank and file” SEC inspectors that quick hits do not drive enforcement. He said the divisions are now coordinating their efforts and stepping up the pace.
So what does it take to make the SEC do the right thing? Among the suggestions by Mr. Khuzami and Mr. di Florio is to expand training programs and modernize the management structure. In addition, they added, it’s time to place “seasoned investigative attorneys back on the front lines and improve examiners’ risk management techniques.” No one on the Senate panel bothered to ask where these “seasoned attorneys” have been hiding.
The Kotz report landed on SEC Commissioner Mary Schapiro’s desk in March. The Senate hearing gave the lawmakers a chance to vent their dissatisfaction with the Commission, but it’s anyone’s guess if substance will come out of the Senate probe. Last year, for example, the House Financial Services Committee held hearings on the $336 billion auction rate securities scandal, but no legislation or regulations followed. When Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) was asked about this failure, he replied, “The (’08) meltdown got in the way.” It now remains to be seen if the Senate Committee can find a clear path to financial reform of the SEC’s enforcement process.
The hearing produced notable contradictions. Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala), the committee’s ranking republican, said the Bernard Madoff $65 billion Ponzi scheme had caught the SEC flatfooted though at least one part of the Commission had been aware of the Stanford case for years. Sen. Shelby was obviously unaware that there had been warnings about Madoff as far back as the late 1990s.
“I believe this should mark the beginning of our review of this troublesome episode,” Sen. Shelby said, referring to Mr. Stanford. “We need to know exactly why evidence of this fraud was not more thoroughly pursued.”
He added that Mr. Khuzami had brought to light “a colossal failure of the SEC.”
Observers wondered why Sen. Shelby was so outraged. “Is he living on another planet?” asked one source. “Is this the first time it crossed his mind that the SEC is maybe a little slow off the mark?”
Another open question: Why was no one fired because of the incompetent handling of the Stanford affair? It seemed a rhetorical question, given that no one was fired in the wake of the Madoff scandal, which was a much larger fraud. Lawmakers also expressed concern that the head of the Fort Worth division later offered to defend Mr. Stanford before the Senate committee.
“It takes time for a culture to change,” Mr. Kotz said. “It takes time to trickle down the line.”
In the meantime, the investing public will just have to wait on trickle-down ethics to kick in before trust is restored.
###

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

One of the most striking aspects of the Protestant clergy sex abuse pattern is that most people don’t realize it is a pattern. The Catholic Church has taken a well deserved beating in the courts and in the court of public opinion as former altar boys, orphans and ordinary parishioners have come forward with appalling stories of sex abuse. Yet equally egregious violations by Protestant clergy have failed to generate the same level of outrage. Why?
You might answer that the problems in the Catholic Church are uniquely widespread, but that would be the wrong answer. Last week’s Eddie Long scandal, in which one of the nation’s most politically connected and homophobic mega-ministers was accused of strong-arming gay sex out of teens, was just one tip of an enormous Protestant iceberg. The news monthly Freethought Today has a regular feature called “Black Collar Crime Blotter,” typically a two-page sampler of fraud, theft, and sexual abuse taken from the media across the country. They just turned their archive over to the Kinsey Institute. A website called ClergyGoneWild.com provides links to recent crime stories, including child abuse (206 articles) and internet solicitation (18).
This problem is nothing new. The first book on clergy sex abuse in this country, Betrayal of Trust, was published in 1988. The perception that Catholic priests are overrepresented among offenders is correct. They do offend at a higher rate. But because this country is predominantly Protestant, more children are abused by Protestant ministers than by Catholic priests. In 1990, the Freedom from Religion Foundation issued a study on pedophilia by clergy. At that time, two clergy per week were being arrested in North America for sex crimes against children. Fifty-eight percent of them were Protestant.
Why do we largely overlook the horrific pattern of Protestant pedophilia and sexual exploitation? Here are a few factors to consider:
The Catholic Church is easier to think of as a monolithic entity. That means it is easier for the press to cohere the abuse incidents into a single story and our brains to grok it. The idea of one big conspiracy appeals to us: “The Church” did it and then covered it up.
The centralized hierarchy of Catholicism makes Catholic offenders easier to sue and guarantees deep pockets. The lawsuits in turn both generate their own news cycle and bring victims out of the closet.
Since most Americans are Protestants, the Catholic sex abuse scandal is a story about “them.” Protestant Pedophilia is a story about “us,” which makes it less gratifying and more uncomfortable.
Most Americans find the idea of celibacy peculiar at best. It makes for a more interesting narrative than a generic story about abuse of authority.
Has the priestly pledge of celibacy contributed to a pattern of inappropriate and exploitative sex by Catholics? Probably. But a look at the behavior of politicians and Protestant ministers — even just those iceberg tips that actually emerge into daylight — should tell us that celibacy is a small part of the story. The reality is that power is arousing for many male humans (and that male power and status are arousing for many females). The pattern is plain as day in Hollywood dramas, rape statistics, sexual fantasies, D.C. dramas, and clergy sex abuse. (Where is the university research on the topic?) And yet we continue to delude ourselves that Protestant ministers are somehow exempt from the endemic, that the incidents are isolated. We say that “absolute power corrupts absolutely,” and yet we give ministers a level of deference that is unparalleled — and expect our vulnerable children to do the same.
When Annie Laurie Gaylor wrote Betrayal of Trust 22 years ago, the pattern in Catholic congregations was to huddle the wagons around accused clergy. She quotes one defense witness who described the abuse as “one drop of ink in crystal clear water.” Today, after years of repeated exposure, Catholics are less likely to rally to the side of pedophiles, turning potentially devastating ire and scorn on the victims. To Gaylor, the New York Times stories this week of Eddie Long taking the pulpit amidst standing ovations and catcalls of love is dj vu. “Some Protestants are where Catholics were 20 years ago,” she says. “We have a long ways to go.”

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com