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At the National Eating Disorders Association conference last Saturday in New York, I had the delight of attending Susan Ringwood’s presentation on “All Walks Beyond the Catwalk.” Susan is the chief executive of b-eat, the leading UK charity for people with eating disorders. As I know from serving with her on the Academy for Eating Disorders advisory board, she’s also one of our most ferocious champions for change in the way commerce promotes body shape and size. Her presentation focused on the fashion industry and her incredible initiative to revolutionize designers’ attitudes about “model” bodies.
It wasn’t easy. She approached the task via the British Fashion Council, and when she made her case to designers she was frequently vilified. “Did anyone try to tell Picasso to change his models?” one of them demanded. Susan somehow managed not to say that she’d seen Picassos, and this — was no Picasso. Instead, she pointed out that when Picasso painted his model’s nose behind her ear he didn’t require the model’s actual nose to be behind her ear, nor did his audience attempt to relocate their own noses to look like the painting. But this designer required real models to be unnaturally thin, and real women tried to emulate this unnatural look, often to their emotional and/or physical detriment.
Finally, Susan began to make headway with the council and a few fashion editors and designers who saw the wisdom of creating clothes for the customers who would actually be buying them. (The notion that this is a tough sell in the fashion industry will never fail to amaze me.) The result was an event that opened London Fashion week last year — causing more than a few fashionista jaws to drop.
All Walks on the Catwalk began with a challenge to eight young designers to design gorgeous clothes for models of a wide variety of ages, sizes, and ethnicities. Then these models wearing their creations opened London Fashion Week, 2009. Susan showed us some of the fabulous footage and images, which can be found at http://allwalks.org
The media loved it.
The event, in fact, was so successful that the British Fashion Council now tends to take full credit. That’s just fine with Susan, as long as they continue to support this movement toward change. Her statement says it all:

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

The foreclosure fraud scandal is a big deal (or a big “effin’” deal, as Joe Biden might say). But its real significance is an even bigger deal. Foreclosure fraud is one domino, and if it falls others will follow. The result could be an end to the “invisible bailout” – the one you never hear about, the one that forces millions of people to subsidize bad lending practices in order to prop up Wall Street.
The invisible bailout is the reason why the government isn’t pushing to freeze foreclosures. If the foreclosure process is halted and lending practices are thoroughly investigated, it might eventually force bankers to own up to their own lawlessness – and write down billions of dollars in artificially inflated assets. How are they going to pay themselves record bonuses if that happens?
How much could that cost? One in four US homes is underwater, which means that proper accounting would require a writedown of enormous proportions. And, as the AP reported, “forecasters at John Burns Real Estate Consulting predicted that 41 percent of residential sales this year would be on distressed properties.” The banks have been counting on that revenue.
Write down one mortgage in four? Halt nearly half of all home sales?
Now that’s a big effin’ deal.
To play the game, first place the blame
Ever wonder why so many pundits and politicians keep hammering underwater homeowners as morally reprehensible, while giving bankers a free pass for lending to them? It’s because the ongoing success of the bank bailout depends in part on protecting banks from having to account for the billions of dollars in bad loans they generated. How do you do that? By convincing the public that borrowers are the ones who were irresponsible, if not downright criminal, and that they have a moral obligation to pay banks the full value of these loans.
That’s the agenda that gets served by pieces like last year’s “Homeowner Bailouts Reward Irresponsibility,” which singled out real estate flippers and lambasted people who overspent for houses they couldn’t afford. But flippers are a tiny percentage of the real estate market, and those people with houses they “can’t afford” were told they could afford them … by the banks!
That’s also why so many stories of mortgage fraud singled out homeowners who overstated their incomes or otherwise provided falsified information in obtaining a mortgage. But the FBI – hardly a bastion of socialism – estimated that 80% of mortgage fraud was performed by businesses (“Fraud for Profit”) and not individuals (“Fraud for Housing”). Yet homeowners are being stigmatized in order to reduce political pressure to provide them with some form of mortgage relief.
As for the noncriminal loans, which presumably remain the majority of those outstanding, borrowers didn’t take them out as part of a nationwide attempt to live beyond their means. These loans were aggressively marketed to homeowners by banks. A lot of people got rich giving out these loans. But our “invisible bailout” policy requires a public belief that homeowners are morally obligated to pay full value on loans written at inflated house prices.
That’s where pieces like one written by Fareed Zakaria (and discussed here) were so important. For this argument to succeed, it was necessary to believe that the economic crisis was the result of their “bad habits” and their own native greed. “We … took out a massive mortgage and financed our fantasies,” Zakaria writes.
But who fueled the fantasies? Who offered consumers these mortgages?
Catch-22 for Homeowners
Banks convinced people their homes were worth an inflated amount and persuaded them to borrow against that amount. The “invisible bailout” strategy relies on homeowners to pay them the full amount of that inflated loan, with no penalty to the bank for its role in that transaction. To help homeowners, the government’s response has been to lower interest rates. But the banks won’t lend money to someone whose collateral is worth less than the value of the loan! (Banks suddenly get religion about a home’s real value when it’s time to issue credit.)
That leaves homeowners in a Catch-22. Who benefits? The banks, of course. They still collect against the inflated value of the house, and at older, higher interest rates – while pocketing the zero-interest money the Fed is throwing their way.
That’s the invisible bailout, and it’s worked like a charm … until now.
Bled dry
Of course, when you’re bleeding people like they’re meatlocker inventory in a vampire delicatessen you’re going to lose some of them. Foreclosures – lots of them – are the cost of doing business this way. But the banks must have decided that it’s better to go through the foreclosure process than to write down their stated assets to a reasonable level.
But there’s a problem with that. They had themselves quite a little party by swapping these inflated mortgages as securities, but now that the party’s over it’s getting messy. Nobody knows who owns what, exactly. That left them with a choice: Admit that they can’t always trace the chain of ownership, or falsely claim that they had this information when they really didn’t.
Remember, if banks admit that they can’t prove ownership, then they have to write down a lot of assets. If their lack of information had become known, they might have had to negotiate with homeowners … for the actual, current value of the home! That’s exactly what they don’t want to do.
Blackmail on the books
So the banks bluffed it out instead and hoped they’d get away with it. That’s a reasonable enough assumption. After all, they’ve gotten away with so much already. As “Synthetic Assets” points out: “over the past half century the financial industry has not treated the law as a bedrock institution that constrains … its activities, but rather as a set of rules that can be forced to adapt to the industry’s needs and desires.”
As long as a financial collapse threatens the entire economy, these bankers understand that the government will retrofit the law to fit their behavior. The alternative would be an economic crisis. (That’s why we need to break up the big banks.)
Bankers. Aren’t they supposed to know something about managing money?
Mortgage fraud was a huge business in the 2000′s, leading to more than a billion dollars in restitutions in 2003-2005 alone (and identified cases were a tiny fraction of the total). Bank assets are loaded down with fraudulently written loans which, if acknowledged, would hit them hard (and make it more difficult for bankers to pay themselves record bonuses again this year).
Then there are the legally obtained but still highly overpriced assets, mostly real estate that’s worth much less than what’s on the books.
And consider this: We have a massive problem with homes under foreclosure, because bank haste and greed have left them with no clear title. That means it’s not clear who owns these houses. We only learned about it through the foreclosure process, but the same title problems must exist for homes that aren’t going through foreclosure. We could be looking at millions of homes whose ownership is unclear. No wonder bankers tried to hide the problem with fraudulent affidavits.
The IMF estimated that banks worldwide still needed to write down $550 billion in bad debt – and that was before this problem arose.
Investors hate banks right now, and no wonder. Non-interest revenue has fallen by more than $10 billion since 2007, while this kind of problem will cause their expenses to rise. Banks are trading below book value on the open market, which should be (but won’t be) celebrated by the Right as an instance of an informed market making a wise decision. (Only 8% of banks traded below their book value in 2001, and by 2008 that was up to 60%.)
As the IMF says, bankers are running a “very fragile” business. Even with a license to break the law, profits are down and they can’t dig their way out of the hole they made. That suggests they’re not very good at their jobs. What’s the right set of incentives for that kind of record? Record bonuses, of course – even if it means taking a bigger percentage of their reduced profits to do it.
But what they must do at all cost to protect those bonuses is pretend everything’s fine. They’re not even writing down second liens on homes, which are notoriously over-borrowed. (Did I mention that these guys are giving themselves record bonuses?)
Dominoes
Nobel prizewinner Joseph Stiglitz, who also bears the distinction of having been correct about the housing bubble, thinks it’s time for the banks to write down the excess value of these loans. As Stiglitz observes, that will be painful for the banks in the short term, although it would be “nothing in comparison to the suffering they have inflicted on people throughout the rest of the global economy.”
But the Administration’s reluctant to do that. That’s why we heard such tepid remarks from the White House about the foreclosure fraud scandal over the weekend. If the foreclosure fraud issue is pursued too aggressively, it throws 41% of all expected housing sales into question. It raises even more questions about the ownership of millions of loans in good standing, potentially giving homeowners leverage to renegotiate based on the actual market value of their homes. And it reopens the issue of “writedowns.”
Illegal submission of foreclosure documents was part of a larger cover-up. People need to be arrested for it – but that, of course, would open up a larger can of worms. The legal process could very well reveal the extent of the title problem, as well as other potentially widespead criminal practices.
Still, that’s no reason not to cuff ‘em and book ‘em. If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime …
Foreclosure fraud is the first domino. If it’s tipped over, the “invisible bailout” would end. Banks would no longer be subsidized by American homeowners. Know what that means? Bye-bye, bonuses. Hello, increase in discretionary spending for American consumers. And hello there, new jobs.
Anyone for a game of dominoes?
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Richard (RJ) Eskow, a consultant and writer (and former insurance/finance executive), is a Senior Fellow with the Campaign for America’s Future. This post was produced as part of the Curbing Wall Street project. Richard also blogs at A Night Light.
He can be reached at “rjeskow@ourfuture.org.”
Website: Eskow and Associates

Follow Richard (RJ) Eskow on Twitter:
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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Saturday was the 70th anniversary of the birth of John Lennon, born and raised in Liverpool, but a New Yorker by choice for the last nine years of his life.His tragic death on December 8, 1980 in front of his home led to outpourings of sorrow from around the world.Mayor Koch led a memorial gathering to honor his memory at the Bandshell in Central Park on Sunday, December 14 attended by an estimated 100,000 people. Recordings of Beatles’ music were played for the crowd, but no speeches were made.
On December 18, 1980, a resolution to honor Lennon was introduced in New York’s City Council by the Councilmember-at-Large from Manhattan. It was co-sponsored by 30 members from all five boroughs, a majority of the Council. Here is the text of the resolution:
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Under the rules of the Council, in order to be adopted on first reading, a resolution required unanimous consent.This resolution was objected to by Councilman Angelo Arculeo of Brooklyn, a Republican who was minority leader of the Council.In his remarks, he said that Lennon was a drug user, that his example had led other people to use drugs, and that he was not an appropriate person for the City Council to honor. Arculeo added that he didn’t “recall these kinds of tributes being extended to Bing Crosby, who really was an American legend.” Consequently, the resolution was tabled.
If the Council wishes to do so, it can correct this 30-year-old injustice by adopting the resolution now.
The municipal legislature did, however, honor John Lennon in a more important way. On March 26, 1981, it adopted a bill which named an area in Central Park as Strawberry Fields, a reference to the Beatles’ 1967 song, “Strawberry Fields Forever.” The bill was signed into law by Mayor Edward I. Koch on April 16, becoming Local Law No. 34 of 1981. Here it is:
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After the passage of the bill, Yoko Ono Lennon wrote to the Parks Department, proposing that the area known as Strawberry Fields, which is about 5.3 acres in size, be freshly landscaped, with plantings from all over the world and works of art. She offered to pay for all the work done, and contribute to a fund whose interest would help pay the salary of a gardener to maintain the area.
It took four years to secure the necessary approvals, design and build Strawberry Fields. The story will be told by Sara Cedar Miller, historian and photographer for the Central Park Conservancy, in a book, Strawberry Fields: Central Park’s Memorial to John Lennon, to be published by Abrams in June 2011.
One point, however, should be made here. Yoko Ono did not contribute money to Central Park on condition that the area now called Strawberry Fields be so named in honor of her husband. We proposed the resolution and the name change without any contact with her, and without any plan for the improvement of the area. She called Mayor Koch on her own to make the offer, and the mayor referred her call to then-Commissioner Gordon Davis and Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, co-founder of the Central Park Conservancy in 1980 and the deus ex machina of the restoration of Central Park.
The name change was the city’s spontaneous honor to a worldwide figure who chose to make his home here.The beautification and redevelopment of the area came subsequently, as Yoko Ono’s generous gift to the people of the City of New York, who will enjoy Strawberry Fields for generations to come.
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Click here and scroll down to see a photo from the dedication of Strawberry Fields on October 9th, 1985, the 45th anniversary of John Lennon’s birth and his son Sean’s 10th birthday. Pictured from left to right are Mayor Koch, Sean Lennon, Henry Stern, Yoko Ono, and then-Manhattan Borough President Andrew Stein.

Follow Henry J. Stern on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/nycivic

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

If the likes of Ian Freeman marked the first wave, and Michael Bisping spearheaded the second, then Liverpool’s Paul Sass may just represent the latest line of British mixed martial artists. The 22-year-old from Liverpool, England, makes his official UFC debut this Saturday (October 16) at UFC 120 and — get this — is hoping for a ground battle. Not only that, he wants to win by submission.
Hearing such a revelation from the mouth of a British fighter is akin to discovering Bob Dylan wants to trade his acoustic guitar for a sampler. So the stereotype goes, British fighters are supposed to stand and bang in fights. Meat and potatoes. Fish and chips. They are simple beings, with heavy hands and a heavy striking disposition. They suffer nosebleeds when taken down and, though gallantly fighting off the inevitable, meet their doom with a triple tap.
Unable to call on the same collegiate wrestling background enjoyed by their American peers, British mixed martial artists have often run into trouble when pitted against superior grapplers. There have, of course, been exceptions to the rule, but, on the whole, the template is out there. Brits are deemed potent for as long as they can remain upright.
On October 16 in London, one fresh-faced Brit will neglect the expected striking pose and look to drag his foe to the floor as swiftly as possible. Paul Sass is like no other Brit.
“I’m just the complete opposite to everybody else, I guess,” laughs the lightweight newcomer. “I’ve always been a little bit different.
“I’m a ground fighter that loves to look for submissions. My stand up game has come on 100% since I started doing mixed martial arts, and I now feel more well rounded than I’ve ever been. I usually see how the first couple of minutes of a fight are going, and if I’m getting my way with the stand-up, I can keep it there and win the fight. If not, I’ll get the fight to the floor and go for submissions. Submissions are my thing.”
Yes, you heard it right. Submissions are Sass’s thing. If given the choice, he’d rather rip off an arm than clean a clock. While domestic fighting peers offer ample servings of both — striking and grappling — Sass excels in the latter. So what went wrong?
“I started off doing the ground game and jiu-jitsu, and then moved on to striking afterwards,” adds Sass. “A lot of people in Britain have done it the other way round. I just happened to find my feet on the floor first, and that’s why I love jiu-jitsu so much.
“I did pure grappling for a couple of years, concentrated on nothing else, and then moved more towards striking as my career progressed. I always go into my fights with the intention of getting it to the ground and winning by submission. I don’t think that mindset will change.”
This isn’t just pre-event, UFC-laced hyperbole, either. Sass has the stats and the submissions to back up the bizarre reputation. An expert with the triangle choke, Sass’s dedication to his USP has landed him a world submission record and a stunningly impressive career resume. Not only is the Liverpudlian unbeaten in ten, he’s also won nine of those fights via submission. Perhaps more staggering is the fact Sass has scored seven of his ten victories by triangle choke. Moreover, the first seven fights of his career were ultimately decided by that submission method. Remember, this youngster’s British, not Brazilian.
“I never went in looking for any of those triangles — they just happened naturally,” explains Paul, who meets Mark Holst on Saturday night in London. “I saw the opportunity for a triangle and took it. In a couple of those fights I’d actually gone for another submission first — say, an arm-bar or a kimura — and then eventually settled on the triangle, as that was the better option.
“It was almost like destiny that I was going to win fights by that method. The first time I ever took part in a grappling class I managed to pull off two triangles. The move hadn’t even really been taught to me properly at that stage. I think it’s just a natural submission for me.”
Don’t be surprised if similar sentiments are uttered by many of the next wave of British mixed martial artists. At only 22 years of age, Sass is part of an exciting new batch of mixed martial artists gradually rising to the premier league of their sport. He has grown and matured alongside the burgeoning sport and knows no different or better. He hasn’t been extracted from another combat sport or nurtured via traditional martial arts. Paul Sass is a fresh product of mixed martial arts. He’s one of the new guys. Learn to love him — there’s many more where he came from.
One year older, but no less talented is Brighton’s John Hathaway, a welterweight with sights also set on victory at UFC 120. The 23-year-old fighter, once a standout rugby league prospect, has notched four UFC wins to date and is buoyed by the recent critical response to his May victory over Diego Sanchez.
Former title challenger Sanchez was thrown around like unwanted litter for three rounds by Hathaway, as the London Shootfighters product upset the odds with a decision win. Victory aside, it was the manner in which Hathaway claimed Sanchez’s scalp that stunned so many. Utilizing every inch of his larger frame, Hathaway stuffed numerous takedown attempts, pushed Sanchez backwards and outlasted a man famed for his endurance and work ethic. He dominated every aspect of the game — yes, grappling and wrestling included.
Like the aforementioned Sass, talented Hathaway knows nothing different. He’s a pure and honest creation of the sport he now plies his trade in.
On Saturday night in London he faces veteran Mike Pyle, another man who has been around longer and seen far more than the young prodigy. In truth, experience might be the only thing this next generation of British scrappers lack. Though boasting a history of fighters through the centuries, this third wave of talent might represent Great Britain’s first genuine, by-the-book definition of 21st century mixed martial artists. Watch out, world.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

The first thing you notice, when you look at the new Ad Week 25 list of Twitter advertising voices, is how few of them are the advertising faces — the creative directors, the CMOs — who drive this industry.
Which makes me think that maybe there aren’t that many great advertising voices on Twitter in the first place. And I’ve been looking for them. I always have a TweetDeck column set to “advertising,” kind of like those NASA listening stations waiting for intelligent life. But instead of insights from people who advertise for a living, I get tweets from busty spammers like @TouchMeNow69. That’s someone I might click on — but not for marketing advice.
I’m going purely on anecdotal evidence here, but I think that advertisers and agencies do not use social media enough — they just don’t get it. And if you don’t get social media yourself, it’s tough to offer it to your customers.
Why SEOs get social media… and advertisers don’t.
I tweeted for @yahooadbuzz at Cannes Lions this year, and after a while I started wondering, “Why is no one retweeting anything?” So I wandered up to the balcony and saw below me, in an audience of hundreds, perhaps a dozen glowing screens.
Maybe it was too hot to carry a laptop. Maybe it was France. And maybe everyone was hungover. (I think that last one’s probably true.) But I also think that’s just not what the advertising types at that conference do.
Contrast that with Search Engine Strategies in San Francisco, where the search engine optimization people there swarmed all over my team’s tweets, and essentially had another conference, right there on Twitter. Even after you take into account how much better my team’s tweets probably were than mine, the difference was stunning. The consultants and SEO experts, not people in the advertising business, dominate Twitter.
For Simon Mainwaring, a brand consultant and former creative at Wieden + Kennedy and Ogilvy, says that social media is just the digital days all over. When agencies do social media, if they do social media, they tend to outsource it in some way.
“We saw this with the digital revolution, where everyone would buy digital shops, which let their creative and accounts groups remain islands unto themselves,” he says. “They’re repeating the same mistake with social media.”
There’s a reason for that. Taking the time to learn social media, to marry creativity with new ways of connecting to customers, is too much work. Think about everything that’s different, now that social media is in the mix: paid media giving way to earned media, listening instead of talking, tweets instead of glossy ads.
In other words, as Simon says, social media is easy: “You just have to forget everything you know about advertising.”
“Social media is the opposite of advertising,” says Lisa Barone, chief brand officer at Outspoken Media, an SEO and social media consulting firm. “In advertising you’re talking at your customers. Social media is about relationships.”
For SEOs, learning the point — and the mechanics — of social media has been a lot easier. If anyone gets the value of earned media, and how hard it is to earn sometimes, it’s the guy tweaking the content of a Web page to make it more relevant to audiences. And Twitter interfaces are no big deal when you’re used to working with some of the tools of the SEO trade.
Barone also says that whereas advertisers have been protective of their content, SEOs have embraced the portability of media — how easily content gets passed along and shared. In other words, what makes something go viral.
You are what you tweet
A lot of it comes down to this: SEOs are good at social media because they have to be, while advertisers and agencies think they don’t have to be. When you’re in advertising, you have a nice steady paycheck, and you’re part of a big advertiser or agency. You don’t have to tweet to get noticed.
When you’re an SEO or a consultant, you tend to be on your own. Engagements come through word of mouth. Social media drums up business, and it establishes that you know your stuff. You are what you tweet.
I realize as I’m writing this that I could be wrong. Any day now, some study will say that 97% of agency partners tweet frequently, and already there are agencies and advertisers who are proving me wrong. And tweeting isn’t much of a measure of social media aptitude. Who am I to judge? I tweet for Yahoo!, but don’t much like to tweet.
But then, I think: Yeah, it does matter. The Old Spice Guy campaign wasn’t some kind of miracle — it came from an agency that knew and understand social media, that did it for a living. If you want to understand what social media can do to reach people, you need to spend some time in the trenches doing it.
People are looking for social success, and they want to connect it to their advertising campaigns. That’s a big opportunity. But if you don’t know how to do it, they’re going to take all of that business to someone who does.

Follow Jeff Sweat on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/@mrsweatsaysyea

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

This is part of my ongoing Series on Angel Investing.
Mark Suster, one of the best VC bloggers out there, recently put out his own five-part series on Angel Investing. As usual, (despite running a big VC fund, Launchpad L.A., hosting This Week in Venture Capital and being a family man), this latest series of his was totally comprehensive and got to the very heart of the subject. As one who has been an angel since 2001 and an author of my own much more primitive series on the subject, I devoured Mark’s efforts and had much the same experience as Howard Lindzon- who likened reading these posts to being on a roller-coaster ride!
Prior to the posting of his recent series, I always got a kick out of Mark’s various off-the-cuff comments about Angel Investing in which he referred to it as a “Mug’s Game”. I knew from first-hand experience what he was talking about but it wasn’t until he authored his series that he elaborated on this general opinion. Anyway, he lays out five major pre-requisites for becoming a great angel investor. Without the following, Mark is essentially saying- you are either sh*t-out-of-luck or a plain Mug. (yes, this is meant to be tongue-and-cheek)…. Here they are:
Access to the best dealflow… (being at the “right poker table”)
Possessing the requisite domain knowledge
Having strong relationships with VC’s
Possessing deep pockets (so you can follow-on and avoid being crushed)
Having access to the eventual buyers of these companies
He is no doubt correct, though I pointed out to him that one also needs to account for a wide swath of angels who are involved for different reasons. He agreed and elaborated on this towards the end of this post.
Anyway, his series and our exchange inspired me to provide you with a fuller picture of the angel community. Therefore, in this mini-series of my own I intend to elaborate on the subject of angel investing and to give fledgling angels and others interested in this space the opportunity to learn more about who we are, (it’s extremely varied and diverse!), how you become an angel, and what the general options are in this landscape.
So let’s commence some Angel Profiling, shall we?
To begin, cast your eye over the photos above that headline this post and in the upper levels you will see the faces of some of the “pro-level guys” as I call them. Many of these guys all have the qualities and attributes that Mark laid out in his series, which, for reference purposes, we’ll call the “Susterian qualities”. I’m talking about Ron Conway, Aydin Senkut, Mike Maples, Jason Calacanis, Jeff Clavier, Chris Sacca and others. Just in the last few days some of these elite “super-angels” have been accused by TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington of holding secret gatherings in order to collude and drive deal terms in the Valley. Dave McClure denied it here, but Ron Conway, who was not at the dinner, unleashed on some of his fellow elites with this email TechCrunch recently got ahold of. The press is calling this fascinating episode: AngelGate!
But who are the people in the photos on the bottom row below? No doubt, here are the “Mugs” that Mark refers to… I, for example, am the guy getting his ass kicked in the bottom right-hand photo and the people “cramming me down” are some venture capitalists joined by some angry co-investors on a British deal circa 2001 when I first got started.
(yes- any first-time readers- (and Mom perhaps)- I am kidding…)
The reality is that angels come in all sizes and shapes and with varying motivations and goals. There is actually massive diversity in our ranks. Are there some Mugs among us? Sure there are. I was one myself when I got started no doubt. Are there some maniacs out there as well? Damn right there are! But there’s a whole swath of angels in the middle, many of whom have a good idea of what they are doing and why they are doing it and, though not in the pro-leagues- are “in control of themselves” so to speak. Here are some News Flashes for you that the mainstream press hardly ever takes note of:
Not all angels live in Silicon Valley!
Not all angels are interested in consumer internet companies!
There are vibrant angel communities in NYC, Boston and in other cities around the US!
Angels account for 90% of all start-up funding in the US!
Angels put up20 Billion a year into approximately 50,000 startups!*
Friends & Family put up an estimated60 Billion a year into startups!*
There are an estimated 225,00 angels in the United States*
There are currently ~300 active angel groups in the United States*
*Source: Angel Capital Association
Furthermore, Angels have all kinds of reasons and motivations for investing. You can pretty much categorize us as follows:
Friends and Family supporting “our own”
“Mugs” who don’t know what the heck they are getting into and don’t realize it (me circa 2001)!
Maniacs Tilting at Windmills (who don’t know what they’re doing, realize it, and don’t care)
“Weekend Warriors” of varying skills and motivations, (this includes participants in Angel Groups)
Entrepreneurs Giving Back and supporting the younger generation
Celeb Angels (Ashton Kutcher, Will.i.am, etc.)
VC Angels (VC’s who do some angel investing on the side)
Professional Angels (the pro-leaguers I have mentioned above)
In the coming mini-series I am going to round-out this fascinating landscape with various posts which will include but are not limited to a map of the overlapping and concentric circles of the angel landscape, a list of angels who blog, and a description of the ones I call the “Dark Angels”. Stay tuned!

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Thirteen years ago at age 34, I came to a crossroad in my life. At 5’3″, I was considered obese, wearing a size 16. I had struggled with my weight since I was a little girl and often got teased by the other kids in school. My growing girth did little for my self-esteem. I was never the first or even the fifth chosen for the dodge ball team.
I went on my first diet when I was 12-years-old, which propelled me into the crazy world of deprivation dieting and binge eating. One extreme always led to an episode of the opposite extreme. I was either on a diet or binging. There was no middle ground and never a sense of balance or peace in my life regarding food or my weight. This vicious cycle held a tight grip on me for more than two decades.
At the time of my crossroad, I was introduced to meditation and contemplation. Through my practice, I began getting glimpses of the peace and calm that I was desperately craving. As I slowed down, I began to observe my eating habits, as well as my thoughts, attitudes and behaviors around food and dieting.
What I discovered was amazing and shocking to me. I began to observe my thoughts closely and started to recognize that I had adopted a certain thought pattern that was keeping me fat and unhappy. I call it my “diet mind.” These thoughts were steeped in the belief, that if only I could stick to a diet, then all my problems would be solved. Because I could never stay on a diet longer than a week or two, I also believed I was weak, lazy, and lacked willpower.
Due to my deepening spiritual practice, I was able to objectively observe the self-defeating thoughts that my “diet mind” wanted me to believe. Without judgment or attachment, I listened and learned. I came to know that the negative thoughts were based on ideas that were rooted in the world around me. They invoked a lot of shame, guilt, and self-hatred. They did not come through the loving eyes of my innermost wisdom and truth.
When I reflect inward for divine guidance, it is pure love, acceptance, and forgiveness. I feel a sense of healing and balance in my physical, emotional and spiritual life. By focusing more and more attention on my “balanced-health mind,” I began to realize I was already whole. That awareness allowed me to look at this issue from a point of strength and empowerment.
Here is what I found as some major distinctions between “the diet mind” and “the balanced-health mind.”
See if any of these resonate with you:
The diet mind says, “I am restricting my food for a certain amount of time.”
The balanced-health mind says, “This is a journey, a lifestyle change that will be achieved one day at a time.”
The diet mind says, “I have to control my eating.”
The balanced-health mind says, “I’m giving up control, and allowing my innermost truth to guide me.”
The diet mind focuses primarily on the physical aspects; such as the amount of weight I lose and how fast I can lose it.
The balanced-health mind focuses on my emotional and spiritual wholeness that leads me to a healthier physical body. The outcome is left to my innermost loving and trusted companion.
The diet mind says, “I will restrict my food until I reach my goal weight. At that time, I will go back to eating the way I did before.”
The balanced-health mind says, “I will fine-tune my eating behaviors every day. I don’t need to worry about tomorrow or regret what I did yesterday. Today is all there is.”
At my fork in the road, I vowed to never diet again. Instead, I chose to listen to my ultimate authority, the divine spirit within. By making that shift, I released more than 50 pounds in less than a year, creating a life of balance, joy and peace. By God’s grace, one day at a time, I am living free of food addiction, binge eating disorder, and body image distortion.
If you are tired of going from one failed diet to the next and are open to a new way of looking at food, weight, body image and self-esteem; try listening to your “balanced-health mind.” With practice and awareness, you will come to realize you have all the tools you need to create a healthy body. The best part is that they are within you right now.
Diet or not to diet, the choice is always yours. Go for it!
Bronwyn Marmo is an award-winning and bestselling author and speaker. She is the Associate Producer and one of the featured experts in the wildly successful documentary film, The Inner Weigh. She appears regularly on Phoenix Channel 3′s, Your Life A to Z, in her own segment, SpotLite On Success.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

I teach a course in writing memoir, which began today. I love memoir — as a writer, a reader, and a teacher — and find many joys in it, on many levels. One thing that does not enter into a memoir writers’ head, however, is the question, “What if?” That question belongs to fiction writers alone — and asking it, answering it, and finding where it leads, is a distinct pleasure.
It’s particularly fun to ask it in conjunction with a careful reader. I just did this, with a new friend of mine. This friend was asking what I was working on, and after I told her, she said, “Can I read some of it?” I’m not used to non-writers asking that, and was a little taken aback. I said, “Sure,” and sent her some pages. I figure nothing would come of it. She might call and say, “It was good,” or “I liked it,” or something benign.
But instead, this friend called and said, “I feel like I wanted something more.” I was taken aback a second time. Not only had she asked to read it, she had offered an actual critique. How lucky I was to find such a friend! She wasn’t able to articulate what she felt was missing, but we talked around it, and finally got to the place where we were asking, “Well, what if….” We were all over the place with our musings, and then suddenly I said something and thought, “That’s it!” The “what if” was exactly what was needed to punch up this piece of the story, and I recognized it the minute I heard it.
I hung up the phone so thrilled, and so grateful, and have been waiting all day for the chance to put into my pages my new “what if.”
I guess it just goes to show you why it’s always good to make a new friend — and to say YES when someone asks to read your work.

Follow Jennie Nash on Twitter:
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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

The first thing to notice about energy policy is a moral question: does the U.S. have the right
to consume 25% of the world’s energy resources? Unless one sincerely believes that might makes right, the honest answer has to be “no.” Realistically, of course, it is hard to imagine significant change in our behavior on moral grounds.
Whether a reduction in our energy use comes from dwindling oil supplies, increased competition from other countries (China comes to mind), or increased costs, a reduction is coming. The interesting thing is that we accept and adapt more easily to such changes if we perceive them as inevitable and uncontrollable, rather than as conscious choices.
Let’s pretend, though, that we are capable of conscious energy choices. Let’s say that we choose a goal of energy sufficient to maintain our standards of living, rather than all the energy we can eat. What could the U.S. do to pursue energy sufficiency?
Goal setting, to start the discussion. Suppose we set a goal of an absolute reduction in our current energy use of 50% in 20 years. How hard would this be to achieve? The focus has to be on waste reduction, and with improved energy efficiency.
Build gas sippers, not gas guzzlers
The combined auto fleet standard is moving to 35 miles per gallon. Suppose we set a goal of 55 miles per gallon within 20 years? Technologically possible, but something would have to give: heavy or supercharged cars no longer would be common. Do we have a Constitutional right to drive a gas-guzzler? Not really, it is just where the largest profit margins have been, with much advertizing to match.
Driving more energy efficient cars could be marketed as the patriotic thing to do, even if this is hard to imagine. After all, filling the gas tank sends a lot of money abroad, as a form of foreign tax on driving. Wouldn’t it be patriotic to keep more of that money here? Still, let’s set the goal at 55 mpg, and challenge the auto industry to innovate.
Stop heating the outdoors
An enormous amount of energy is wasted in “leaks” from our buildings. The solution is better insulation, but how can this be done?
First, construction codes need to be stricter, calling for higher insulation values, and for “leak” tested buildings. It is not enough to insulate if the benefits leak away. Of course it is easier and cheaper to require better insulated construction for new buildings, so the problem of our existing housing/office/factory supply also has to be addressed.
Here, we could create the Insulate America Corps, modeled on the Depression era Works Progress Administration. Say a million people would be trained to install new insulation, and to conduct energy audits of our homes, apartments, offices and factories. This would be an investment with long-term benefits, as passive insulation can save energy for the life of the building. It also would put people to meaningful work.
Second, we need to rethink our comfort zones. Is it really necessary to cool offices in the Summer to the point where people wear sweaters to work? To heat offices in the Winter to the 70′s? We need a serious effort to reset our thermostats, as the patriotic thing to do.
Fix the lights
Replace incandescent bulbs with newer technologies; and install automatic movement sensors which turn off lights when no one is in the room, and turn on lights when movement is detected.
Make things last
Planned obsolescence is a major energy waster. Once, washers and driers lasted 20 years or more. Now, most of the market is for machines which may last 5-8 years. Setting new durability standards for major appliances would be a significant energy saver. Washers and driers should be built to last: a 25 year warranty. Cars should be built to last: a 15 year/200,000 mile warranty. Refrigerators should last 20 years. Air conditioners should last 15 years. And so on. We need to think long-term, and support new technologies which produce durable products.
Change the subsidies
Ethanol: Congress chose subsidies for ethanol, but there are at least two problems with ethanol production. One, there is not much net energy savings in ethanol production, a point well-documented by now. Two, the diversion of corn to fuel use increased the price for food corn. We need to remove our ethanol subsidies and let the free market determine its place in the energy picture.
Coal: Coal will remain a major energy source for a long time, but coal is not “clean,” either in extraction or in use. Reducing demand for coal by reducing our energy use will benefit the environment.
Oil and gas: Domestic oil production has been declining for some time. As we recently learned in the Gulf of Mexico, deep water drilling can be risky. Alaska’s reserves are a tiny part of the need, even if the environmental impacts are ignored and higher production is allowed. Shale and tar-sands are waiting for the technological break-through which will make production both economical and clean.
Long ago, Congress adopted incentives for oil and gas production which no longer (never?) make sense. The depletion allowance offers tax deductions based upon the volume produced, on the policy that once oil/gas is produced, the companies have less in the ground in future profits. The depletion allowance compensates companies for their depletion of the resource. Today, this policy makes no sense at all. We need to conserve our oil and gas resources, not exhaust them.
We should abolish the depletion allowance and replace it with an exhaustion tax. This would be an incentive for the energy companies to support energy conservation, to prolong their profits.
Nuclear power: The nuclear power industry is not cost-effective. It has been supported by a long list of subsidies and incentives. Congress has limited their liability in case of accidents, and provided huge loan guarantees for new plant construction. Many observers have noted that the nuclear industry is price-competitive only with significant government support. We need to eliminate the liability caps, any subsidies, and the loan guarantees. Other forms of energy should receive government support instead. Which ones?
Renewables: Renewable energy sources, such as solar power and wind power deserve the massive government support which up to now has gone to fossil fuel and nuclear power. Why, because solar and wind are renewable resources, and the U.S. has enormous potential for these sources. This does not rule out support for other new technologies.
The focus on solar and wind is practical: government support would make a significant difference right now for our energy future. A combination of renewable energy farms and small decentralized solar and wind installations, must be part of our energy strategy. Shortening the grid by decentralizing power plants reduces the energy lost in transmission lines, too.
A peek at the consequences
What could be some of the benefits of adopting the goal of 50% energy use reduction?
o It would drive research, innovation and new technologies, giving us renewed leadership in the market.
o It would foster new businesses and industries.
o It would employ millions, many of whom have been discarded and excluded through the recent recession.
o It would reduce our interest in the Middle East and other oil and gas resource centers, reducing our strategic vulnerability and the temptation for military interventions abroad.
o It would improve efficiency and reduce waste throughout the economy.
o It would pay off in great long-term savings.
o It would be in our self-interest.
And finally, we could come back to the moral question. It would be the right thing to do for a small planet. It would be sufficient for a high quality of life, without being wasteful or destructive. Some thoughts for the conversation…

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

In 1960, a 19-yr old second baseman dug his spikes in the dirt of the batter’s box for the Reno Silver Sox and banged out the first hit of what would be a very average minor league career that would take him through Panama City, Great Falls, Albuquerque and far from the bright lights of major league parks for eight full seasons. Then, Broadway called his name, put him on the tour for Mickey Mantle’s last hurrah and gave him a pinstriped number 14 uniform. The second baseman, now almost thirty and playing third, hit an anemic .225 in two seasons before he took the bus back down (and it is down in baseball geography) to Syracuse to play for manager Frank Verdi, who in 1953 played one game for the New York Yankees without an at-bat and never saw the major leagues again. A lot of players never see the majors again after being sent down, a majority actually, and Bobby Cox couldn’t have known on that trip back to the minors in 1969 that he had four Manager of the Year titles in front of him, five World Series to coach and fourteen straight division titles to win spanning the next forty years.
“They played their hearts out, and I’ll miss them,” the manager said of his team.
Bobby Cox slumped his shoulders, sighed and walked to the mound where Derek Lowe, his game 5 starter, had just put two men on with one out in the seventh. Lowe, standing tall on the mound, held the ball, sweating in the Georgia heat as Cox approached. Bobby looked at his pitcher, listened to the man ask for one more hitter and nodded. He gave the ball back to Lowe and shuffled back across the diamond to the bench, moving slowly as if each step were the first he’d ever taken. The move didn’t work out. Lowe walked the next batter and a run eventually scored because of it, ending the manager’s illustrious career. But that is Bobby Cox. The good baseball managers know the situations and know how to beat them. They have an immense knowledge and instinct for the game that allows them to pick-up, compute, and extract information in the flash of a catcher’s sign or the split second sound of mitt popping. Bobby Cox certainly had all of that in spades; but he was great, not just good and it was his ability to see the human side of the game that truly separated him. The guy simply knew players and knew the life. No other manager could have brought the 2010 Atlanta Braves home to October because no other manager could have made them play as hard as they did this summer. He was a player’s manager and they loved him for that and gave whatever they had because they knew he’d look into their eyes and not into the stat book before he took the ball away. Chipper Jones, the Hall of Fame third baseman, who has only played for Bobby Cox, said, “The guys wanted so bad to get Bobby back to the playoffs. And once we got a chance to go to the playoffs, we wanted so bad to get him back to the World Series. All those things contributed to the grit and guts this team played with all year.”
“A grown man shouldn’t do this,” the manager said through tears after the final out of his last game in uniform.
Bobby Cox was far from perfect. He couldn’t hit as a player. He finished dead last for almost half of his first ten years as a manager. He lost over 2,000 games. He was beaten in four out of five World Series. He was charged with battery. He cursed his way to over 150 ejections. He lived the ups and downs of a game and a baseball life that began before the first man was shot into space and ran all the way to the invention of a car that can drive itself. In a game based on failure, the experiences he lived through humbled and helped him become one of the most loved and admired managers in baseball history. He was a manager who Billy Wagner, a closer retiring after a 16 year career said, “Me leaving is nothing. But Bobby being a legend is just like the word says–a legend…I just wish I could have been able to play for him longer.” He was even respected enough that moments after he lost his last game, could make the opposing team of twenty-something year old men who had just clinched a trip to the NLCS, stop their celebration, put the champagne on ice and take their hats off in respect for the man, not just the manager, that Bobby Cox was. In an age where players can be cold enough to say that they are playing for free when they sign ONLY a two million dollar contract, you just don’t see that anymore.
“No more uniform, honey,” the manager promised his wife.
Brooks Conrad set the record for errors in a division series and cost the Braves at least one game in a series of five. He is thirty years old, spent nine years in the minors playing second and third base, and has a career average over three major league seasons of just .231. He is, in effect, similar to who Bobby Cox was forty years ago. The manager had a chance to take him out for a defensive replacement after the third error he committed in game four but did not and Conrad, who may never get to start another playoff game again, said of the man he’s known for only 133 games, “It’s a cutthroat game. It can be brutal at times. When you’ve got a guy backing you no matter what, it’s pretty cool. He’s got every one of our backs no matter what, and I was proud to play for him.” Bobby wore spikes for every game, just like he did when he was 19 yrs old, and well, Brooks, as a fan, I have to say I was proud to watch him.

Follow Colin Barnicle on Twitter:
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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Last month I featured a guest blog from Amanda Arrington, The Humane Society of the United States’ manager of spay/neuter initiatives, spotlighting one of the pet health clinics that are part of our larger Gulf Coast initiative. By bringing low-cost spay/neuter services into the community, often with free vaccination and microchipping, we are eliminating the main barriers–cost and access–that many people face in providing veterinary care to their pets. With this kind of work, we are chipping away, community by community, at the larger problem of pet overpopulation and euthanasia.
We recently hosted another clinic in Jefferson Parrish, La., in coordination with the Jefferson SPCA and the Jefferson Parrish Animal Shelter. Thousands of cats and dogs received free vaccinations, hundreds received free microchips and discounted spay/neuter vouchers and, thanks to a generous donation by FreeKibble.com, five tons of Halo Spot’s Stew pet food was distributed to attendees.
I am posting video from the event. Be sure to watch — the smiles and gratitude from community members whose pets we helped to serve are sure to brighten your day.
This is just another part of The HSUS’s hands-on work, manifest every day across the nation. That work has so many forms, both inside our own animal care centers and in communities like the one depicted in the video.
This post originally appeared on Pacelle’s blog, A Humane Nation.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Understanding what happened in Vietnam 40-plus years ago is a matter of great interest as Americans consider the future of our involvement in Afghanistan. Last November, Newsweek ran a cover story titled, “How We (Could Have) Won in Vietnam.”
It is clear to me from three visits to Vietnam in the past two years — including one with an adult group I led in January and one with Millsaps College students in May — that the real lesson begins with the omission of the “(Could Have)” from that title.
The United States has won in Vietnam. The American victory, which was delayed by more than forty years by the fighting of the war, has finally been achieved despite the efforts of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon to block it.
The United States lost the war, but it has decisively won the peace. The struggle, President Johnson famously said, was for “the hearts and minds” of the people in Vietnam. Hearts and minds are not won through the force of arms; they are won through the force of ideas and culture.
As long as Vietnam kept fighting, it could not lose the military war.
Once the United States stopped fighting, it could not lose the peace.
And if the United States had never fought the war in the first place, it would have won that cultural war much earlier.
Sign in store window in “Ho Chi Minh City” (Saigon)
The Communists won the initial war through physical guerilla warfare. The United States has won the larger struggle for the hearts and minds of the people through cultural guerilla warfare.
Our visas read “The Socialist Republic of Vietnam.” The reality is that today this nation is “The Capitalist Non-Republic of Vietnam.” A one-party political system remains in effect, and there are intermittent, half-hearted attempts to block information from reaching the people. Sometimes you can get on Facebook; sometimes you can’t. Sometimes CNN and the BBC are available on television; sometimes they’re not.
One of the TV stations in our hotel in Hoi An during the May trip had Victoria’s Secret fashion shows running back-to-back around the clock. I would bet that these replaced CNN or the BBC and the government thought showing beautiful women parading in underwear as a substitute for accurate news would lessen the complaints about blocking information.
A woman we asked about various prohibitions and persecutions under the harsh Communist rule during the decade following the fall of South Vietnam in 1975 responded with a sentence that epitomizes Vietnam today: “But now — it’s OK!”
Pick almost any antecedent for “it,” and that assessment applies. It could be the new Vietnamese national motto: “But now — it’s OK!”
As for the “socialist” part of the country’s official name, it is about as accurate as those who scream about President Obama being a “socialist.” Capitalism reigns supreme everywhere one looks.
If anything, this formerly Communist nation has taken laissez faire too far. In deference to their Marxist heritage, the Vietnamese don’t like to describe their current reality by using that vulgar word, “capitalism,” so they speak instead of a “market economy.”
Vietnam today is less socialist than my home state of Mississippi. I’m serious. We badly need universal healthcare in America, but we do provide Medicaid for the poor. Some of our public schools leave a great deal to be desired, but free education is available through high school. We have Social Security. Not so in Vietnam, where the poor must pay both for medical care and to educate their children from middle school up and there are small old age pensions only for government employees.
I expected to see Ho Chi Minh spinning in his glass coffin when we visited him in Hanoi, but he appeared to be serene in the face of the collapse of his revolution through what might be termed the Great Bourgeois Cultural Revolution.
Freedom is a contagion that spreads on its own; it is a self-replicating bacteria; but it cannot be weaponized and spread by warfare.
The situation in Afghanistan is much more complex and difficult, and the lessons of Vietnam may not be applicable. But we should at least be clear about what those lessons are.
So, remove the “(Could Have).” “How We Won in Vietnam” was by ending the war.
Robert S. McElvaine is currently completing a book manuscript on the first half of the 1960s, “Oh, Freedom!” – The Young Sixties. He will lead a trip to Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos in January. Click here for information.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

When I got on that stationery bike at Triple M radio’s Roots Festival in Madison, Wisconsin, providing electricity for Stage 2, I thought, “This is it. Human-powered gyms are right around the corner!” That was 2008.
When I started this blog in 2010, I went straight to Google with “human powered gym new york.”
Uh oh. Architectural renderings of a human-powered gym. Mitchell and Douglas Joachim designed River Gym, a fleet of buoyant, transparent, human-powered gym pods on the Hudson River. Don’t get me wrong. I loved it. But you know how it is with futuristic renderings. They’re like concept cars. They never happen.
Mitchell Joachim’s studio designed a concept car. It’s called the Nerf Car.
I investigated pedal-powered gyms in the present, few though they may be.
A quick starter pedal-power stat: according to Green Microgym’s chart, the “average” human generates 100 watts of pedaling energy, while the “elite” pedals up to 300 watts at a go.
If 50 gyms in New York took on 20 grid-tied (tied to the overall electrical grid) stationary bikes and got about 10 hours of “average” daily use, that’s 100 kilowatts of energy at any given moment, or one megawatt hour a day. That’s not nothing.
So who’s making pedal-powered equipment? Green Revolution, in Ridgefield, CT, and ReRev, in St. Petersburg, FL both retrofit existing gym equipment to send generated watts back to the grid. ReRev sells to a growing number of large universities, enthusiastic early adopters. So there’s a big market that’s up and running.
Re:source Fitness, in Seattle, is actually creating grid-tied equipment. Presently they outfit Green Microgym, a Portland, Oregon gym run by Adam Boesel (who also co-founded Re:source Fitness). I expressed some frustration to Re:source CEO Ryan Barr about his machines not being more widely used. He explained that this is his company’s choice of speed. Ryan wants to manufacture a superior fitness machine above and beyond its environmental contributions, working to bring their web-linked user interface to the next level, for instance. And they’re adding their first Ellipticals to the market in November.
So while we wait for Re:source to go more mass market, why not start with retrofits from ReRev or Green Revolution?
There’s a considerable capital outlay for this retrofitting. Got it. But Gym — may I call you Gym? — I think you should do this anyway. First of all, check out Ecomagination’s clip of the spin class’s overhead monitor at NYSC — one of a handful of clubs using Green Revolution products — showing watts generated in real time. It’s inspirational. Ryan says Re:source is presently assessing the difference that pedal power makes on a workout, but all companies report anecdotal evidence of extra motivation. My friend Patty heard my blog idea and spontaneously said, “I’d get up and run a mile if I knew I was generating electricity.”
The money saved on electricity itself is not an incentive. One kilowatt hour (kWh) of energy, or ten hours on a bike, is fifteen cents. The incentive, Gym, is membership. Your human powered publicity departments can link kinetic energy to personal health even though it’s an indirect benefit. You just need the right imagery, like the Alps.
Bottled water did it. BThey put pictures of mountain chains on their labels and got people to believe that water from a plastic bottle, a bottle that doctors suggest you don’t drink from if it’s been left in a hot car, is more healthy, more pristine, more Alpine, than any tap water.
That’s why I’d recommend the capital outlay. Obviously you’d get the people who love the interdependent greenness of generating power. They’d join your club. But also, you know those unusually slender people at the natural food stores who always look a little disgusted and who scan every product for assurances of purity? They don’t care about the environment past their own kale-flossed colons, but if you visually connect pedaled power with an oxygen symbol or the Matterhorn, they’d totally join your club too.
Jay Whelan, who started Green Revolution, and Ryan Barr at Re:source Fitness both seem busy and happy about the way things are going. Ryan was psyched that UC Santa Barbara just had a celebration in honor of their new Re:source equipment.
I’m the impatient one. I like thinking about how much of our everyday lives we can retain on the other side of peak oil. What if we could still go to you, Gym, instead of burning calories by going mano a mano over five gallon containers of gas?
Maybe someday, I’ll jump in my Nerf car and drive to a floating gym, but real pedal-powered technology is available right now, and I fantasize about you using it, Gym. It can be done. It can be spun.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

If the polls speak truth, the Democratic Party, my party, is facing a shattering defeat on November 2. Moreover, it will be a defeat rendered all the more bitter by the nature of too many of the Republicans likely to be elected to Congress this year. Nothing good can come from a national legislature dominated by people who believe that the earth is six thousand years old, who consider the melting of the Arctic ice cap to be insignificant and who oppose all developments in constitutional law since 1910. Is there anything that can still be done to avert this? Here are some suggestions which I offer in the hope that they might be helpful to embattled Democrats seeking to hold marginal seats.
Democratic candidates understand their political problem, perhaps too well. It is that the Democratic Party, since November 2008, has lost the suburban and exurban independent voters who gave Barack Obama his victory in 2008. In Ohio, for example, these are the voters who voted for George W. Bush, George Voinovich, and GOP congressional candidates in 2004, but swung for victorious Democratic gubernatorial and Senate candidates Ted Strickland and Sherrod Brown in 2006 and then voted for Obama and Democratic House candidates in 2008. This year they are supporting Republican Rob Portman for the Senate against Democrat Lee Fisher and Republican challengers to many endangered Democratic House incumbents, such as Steve Driehaus and Mary Jo Kilroy. It is a story replicated, with state and regional variations, nationwide.
The Democratic counterattack seeks to win back those voters, and its themes are presumed to appeal to them. The other day, I opened one of the dozens of fundraising e-mails I receive every day from Democratic candidates and party committees. It was from Donna Brazile, on behalf of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee. It began:
This encapsulates the Democratic argument, which is that the Republicans don’t care about the “middle class,” roughly defined as everyone whose taxes would not increase in January if the President’s tax proposal prevails. The Republicans favor their corporate and Wall Street allies, who caused the economic crisis of 2008 and still seek to profit at the expense of the beleaguered middle class. By contrast, the Democrats are the friends of the middle class, as evidenced by the stimulus bill, and the health care and financial reform bills. Democrats will stand by social security in its current form and support extension of unemployment compensation, while Republicans seek to undercut both. In recent days, the president and his allies have sought to amplify these charges by alluding to sinister “foreign corporate money” allegedly being spent by the Chamber of Commerce to support Republican candidates.
But whatever their substantive merits, the political difficulty for Democrats this year is that these arguments are simply not working to persuade the target voters. Why? I think there are several reasons, beyond the usual all purpose excuse of “The Economy.” First, in the United States, at least for the last sixty years, right wing populism, as exemplified by such figures as George Wallace and Ross Perot, has usually had more electoral appeal at times of widespread disaffection with the parties than its left wing counterpart. This is something which the left is always disinclined to acknowledge. But at any rate, it is clearly the case in 2010. The Tea Party is a classic right wing populist movement, even if it undoubtedly gets money from rich right wingers.
However, the Koch brothers did not nominate Republican Senate candidates such as Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, Joe Miller, Ron Johnson, and Christine O’Donnell. It took the passionate commitment of the right wing grassroots to do that. Second, The Tea Party and the right generally are making two arguments regarding the future of the country which have connected with voters, and with which Democratic candidates have not engaged. The right says that the country is spending itself into insolvency, and that the federal budget should be cut, albeit in unspecified ways. The right has also successfully revived what could be characterized as the capitalist utopian argument, namely that lower taxes and diminished regulation will restore prosperity and otherwise re-create the country that middle class Americans, particularly white Americans, grew up in and loved.
There are counters to these arguments, among them that on Planet Earth massive tax cuts and multiple wars are not compatible with a balanced budget, but in order to be effective they would have to be offered with equal sincerity and within the context of a narrative with comparable historical resonance. The only possible narrative to meet those requirements is that of twentieth century liberalism, the tradition of Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Johnson, as well as Bill Clinton in his better moments and now Barack Obama. Liberal candidates discussing the issues now before the country should try to link their positions with now widely accepted reforms of the past, which were equally controversial when they were adopted. In short, in countering conservative paeans to the world of yesterday, liberals might try to make voters nostalgic about social reform.
One place they might look to for inspiration would be the speech to Congress and the nation given by President Lyndon B. Johnson on March 15, 1965, in the aftermath of the violence in Selma, Alabama. LBJ called for passage of what later came to be called the Voting Rights Act, the great measure which, after 88 years of disenfranchisement, guaranteed to African Americans in the southern states the right to vote. In the speech, he invoked the memory of having been a young teacher of Mexican-American students in Cotulla, Texas in the twenties, and spoke of his determination then, if he ever had the opportunity, to help people like his students. Without rancor or rebuke of his fellow white southerners, he spoke of the deprivation and indignities to which black Americans were still subjected and of the need to put an end to them. In the end, he electrified the nation by embracing the then intensely controversial battle cry of the civil rights movement, namely “we shall overcome.” It was the finest moment of his presidency, albeit one soon tragically overshadowed by his disastrous decision later that spring to escalate the war in Vietnam.
Read today, there are several striking aspects of his speech. It makes no mention of “the middle class” or any other “class” of Americans, either positively or invidiously. It makes no criticism of corporations or “the rich.” He says explicitly that there is “no Negro problem” or “southern problem” or “northern problem,” only “an American problem.” His speech speaks to his fellow Americans respectfully, as adults and as fellow citizens. No one is excluded from the national community and all can have a part in solving its great problem, that of racial inequality. The speech does not seek to stigmatize or arouse antagonism. Rather, without in any way minimizing the severity of the problem it seeks to solve, it seeks to reconcile and persuade. It was precisely the absence of rancor or political boilerplate that made the speech so effective. Johnson was deadly serious and persuaded the country of the need to act.
It was precisely the moral seriousness of sixties liberalism, far more than the effects of the Vietnam War or the memories of the counterculture, that won a generation for the Democratic Party. For many of us who became adults between, say, 1965 and 1975, the Democratic Party was the party of civil rights and voting rights, of immigration reform and the War on Poverty, of Earth Day and the National Environmental Policy Act, of women’s liberation and the rise of feminism. It is a complex and not untroubled legacy, but certainly one worth defending and capable of adaptation to the problems of today, of which the greatest is the restoration of that prosperity upon which all successful government must rest.
From now until November in this election campaign, I, for one, hope that Democratic candidates would argue that we live in a more just and equal country than the one we had in 1964, and that the Democratic Party is largely responsible for that, and that the kind of Republicans who participated in that achievement are being driven out of their party and are welcome in ours. Democratic candidates should seek to demonstrate the relevance of past accomplishments to solving present problems. For example, most Americans now are proud of the cleaner air and water produced by the legislation of the sixties and seventies. Why not cite that accomplishment in defending a vote for cap and trade legislation? Why be terrified to defend a vote to save the earth? The public is angry, for some good and some bad reasons, and we may well lose the election no matter what our candidates say. But if we do, it would be far better for the future to lose an election fighting to uphold a legacy of enlarging human freedom than to lose a squalid argument about who really wants to “stick it” to the middle class.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

The first images, released in 1994, of the Chauvet Cave paintings located in southern France, ignited the world’s curiosity, mine included. What would it be like to be in the cave with the art, what kind of power must it emit? It’s likely that none of us, nor anyone we personally know, will ever enter the cave.
One artist, whose work I greatly admire, was granted permission to enter the cave: filmmaker Werner Herzog. In his film Cave of Forgotten Dreams, he reports back from the front.
Image courtesy of Werner Herzog Film GmbH
In a scarcely advertised screening last month at the Sunset 5 in West Hollywood, California, I saw the 2D version of Cave of Forgotten Dreams, which is scheduled for release next year as a 3D film. As I understand it, the film needed to be screened for one week, on at least one screen, before the end of the year to be eligible for Oscar consideration. There were literally six people in the audience at the screening. Six!
Herzog allowed us to see the mechanics behind the making of the film. How could he not since the space, movement and time limitations were nearly unworkable in terms of filmmaking. He had shot but four hours a day, for six days only, with the restriction of filming from a two foot wide, specially constructed pathway that meanders through the cave.
Image courtesy of Werner Herzog Film GmbH
In true Herzog fashion, the film caresses the images on the cave walls with brooding music as well as his distinct visually poetry — for example, long, slow, careful shots of the Cave of the Lions — images I’d never seen before since the horse images were often the ones most publicized.
Public domain image retrieved from New World Encyclopedia
As perhaps only Herzog can do, the film takes us back to the origins of that time and space. He takes us to a place of wonder, silent wonder and raw illumination. The flat, low temperature lighting that was permitted for the shoot gives us a clear sense of the torch, the lighting used in the creation of these graphic enigmas. How can one watch a film like this and not be in awe of such a find, while these images are so well preserved and fresh that in person they are said to appear fake, because of their un-aged quality?
Public domain image retrieved from New World Encyclopedia
The cave paintings at Chauvet seem to be part of the original human narrative. Some think we have progressed little since that time, 30,000 years ago. As an artist, I fantasize about what the people who painted in the caves at Chauvet wanted to communicate and what those depictions meant to them. It’s thought that the people who painted the images were not artists at all, but rather the shamans of the tribe. It’s also believed that the shamans were the artists of the time and vice versa.
Certainly the impulse to make images, by whatever means, proves to be a deep part of the human psyche. It makes me realize how unimportant the career aspect of being an artist should be, but of course this is a very different time. Despite the time, space or circumstances it seems somebody has got to make art. How lucky I feel to be one of those people.

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

This past August, when I got on the phone with Repower America members, one thing was clear: We have a great deal of work to do.
We’ve accomplished so much this year. We’ve fought off all attempts to gut the Clean Air Act, and I am so proud of the work we’ve done. But in a year of record temperatures and catastrophic environmental disasters, both you and I know what comes next. We have to roll up our sleeves and continue this fight, with more commitment than ever before.
The attacks on the Clean Air Act aren’t over and the oil lobby’s reach is spreading. As we speak, Texas oil companies are waging a war against clean energy in California. Paid for by the same corporate polluters who funded the climate denial movement, industry giants like Valero, Tesoro and the Koch brothers are working to overturn California’s clean energy law with a ballot initiative called Proposition 23.
I am going to do everything I can to fight to keep our nation on the path to a future with clean energy jobs and safe air to breathe. That’s why protecting critical federal laws like the Clean Air Act and state climate change laws are top priorities for me.
America’s clean energy future is at stake. The consequences of doing nothing and losing this fight are clear. We all watched in horror as the worst environmental disaster in American history devastated the Gulf Coast this year. Our continued reliance on oil and dirty fossil fuels means we can expect more of the same.
That’s why Repower America has put experienced organizers on the ground, including in California to fight Proposition 23. We’ll continue to fight out of care for our country, our globe and the natural inheritance we want to leave our children.
You and I both know now is the time to redouble our efforts. Every time the oil industry tries to pollute our air and water, we want to be there to stop them: whether it’s in California, in the U.S. Senate or in your hometown. But we can’t do it without your help. We’re standing on the precipice of a cleaner, brighter future for our families and we can’t turn back now.
Please follow this link to take action.
The climate crisis isn’t going away, and neither can we.
This post originally appeared at Al’s Journal.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

The US Federal Reserve has confirmed that it may have to carry out additional stimulus measures to boost the US economy “before long”.
In released minutes of its most recent Federal Open Market Committee meeting, it said it was prepared to carry out such a move “if needed”.
The central bank has not decided on what method it would use, but did talk of buying more government debt.
Continuing high US unemployment had led to pressure on the Fed to act.

In 2007, I wrote a blog about the ludicrous comments of Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat, who summarily dismissed the prospect of recognizing Israel as a Jewish state. “No state in the world connects its national identity to its religious identity,” he declared.
Three years later, nothing much has changed. The Palestinian leadership continues to reject acknowledging Israel’s distinctive character, though to do so would not only recognize reality, but also give a big boost to the stalled peace talks.
As I wrote then, such a statement by Erekat is utterly preposterous. What, for example, do Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Brunei, Comoros, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen have in common? You guessed it. Islam is the official religion, though many, such as Malaysia, have significant non-Muslim minorities.
And in Egypt, Shari’a, or Islamic law, is formally given a role as the wellspring of legislation. Moreover, what exactly are we to make of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), an intergovernmental grouping of 57 countries, including the “State of Palestine” whose charter speaks of their “common belief” and whose goals include ensuring “the progress and well-being of their peoples and those of other Muslims the world over?” Is there any similar entity binding countries of other religions together around “common belief?”
And perhaps Mr. Erekat could explain why, if states don’t connect national and religious identities, we have countries whose formal names include the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. To be fair, Muslim countries aren’t alone in establishing state religions and seeking to associate faith and nationality.
There are countries where Buddhism, Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and various Protestant denominations are the established religion. By contrast, in Israel, there is no official state religion, though the majority population and the character of the country are unquestionably Jewish, even as full protection is accorded to minority faith communities.
But Mr. Erekat’s statement isn’t just wrong; it’s also wrong-headed. If he is committed to the search for peace, he has a strange way of showing it. A settlement will only come when several conditions are met, among them recognition by the Palestinians and the larger Arab world that Israel is a Jewish state and was established, with the endorsement of the international community, to be a Jewish homeland.
Otherwise, all bets are off. The Palestinians cannot have it both ways – demand a Palestinian state, to be part of the Arab League and the OIC and to be Judenrein, and, at the same time, reject Israel as a Jewish state, insisting, hypocritically, that it be an “open” state.
That, of course, can only mean one thing: The battle to destroy Israel as we know it will continue to be waged by any means possible. Talk about a nonstarter. The late Yasser Arafat told Bill Clinton, to the president’s dismay, that the Jews had no historical link to Israel and, in particular, Jerusalem, claiming that the Temple never even existed.
Erekat’s remarks show that this unwillingness to recognize indisputable facts wasn’t limited to Arafat. It’s part of decades of willful denial.
It’s time to face reality. It’s time to grasp what Winston Churchill understood when he called the establishment of the Jewish state “an event in world history to be viewed in the perspective not of a generation or a century, but in the perspective of a thousand, two thousand, or even three thousand years.” And what Jorge Garcia Granados, Guatemalan representative to the United Nations, knew when he publicly endorsed Israel’s founding because of his outrage at the time that “no Jew dare risk entering the most celebrated place of the Hebrew religion, because if he did so he might be killed [by Arabs].”
And what President Harry Truman felt when his favorite psalm, Psalm 137, moved him to identify with Zionism: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, as we remembered Zion.” And what French President Nicolas Sarkozy grasped when he spoke at an AJC breakfast of a “two-nation-state solution,” meaning a Jewish and a Palestinian state. The historic connection of the Jewish people to the land – and now the state – of Israel is as legitimate as it is unbreakable.
Israel has made a giant leap in recognizing Palestinian nationhood and the need for a Palestinian state, with all the risks it entails for Israel’s security, as a territorial answer to the needs of the Palestinian people. Now the Palestinians need to reciprocate, and the sooner the better, if the current peace process is to have a chance of success.
Will they? Hamas has already made perfectly clear where it stands, if ever there was ever any doubt. In its statement calling on the UN to apologize for the 1947 Partition Plan, Hamas said, “Palestine is Arab Islamic land, from the river to the sea, including Jerusalem. There is no room in it for the Jews.”
So it’s up to leaders like Erekat to show the world that other Palestinian voices, at long last, recognize what the Balfour Declaration, League of Nations, Peel Commission, United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, and United Nations General Assembly all expressly made clear, and what U.S. President Obama, German Chancellor Merkel, and other world leaders have asserted: There is a compelling and legitimate need for a Jewish – yes, Jewish – state in the region, living alongside other states, each with its own distinctive character. There’s no getting around it. You can’t make peace with someone whose core identity you refuse to acknowledge.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Reflection
In our last blog, “Uncovering Your Beauty: The Foundation of Awareness Spiritual Practice,” we came to know our self as a still and silent awareness. If this is true, then why do we often think of ourselves as anything but stillness and silence, unable to be quiet even for a moment? It is because we identify our self with our mind, grounding our identity in the stream of thoughts it produces, especially the web of thoughts coalescing around the concept of “I.” To the extent that we identify with this creation of the mind, we associate our self with the activities of our mind — thoughts, dreams, feelings, reflections, fears, and memories. We create our drama where we love and suffer, experience loss and gain, live and die, but is this reality?
Instead, if we place our attention on our awareness and identify with it, we come to know ourselves as stillness and silence. The self of the mind remains as a functional entity in the world, but it loses its grip on our identity, allowing our original face of be revealed.
Let’s continue to discover who we are in the present moment by focusing our attention on ourselves as awareness engaged in the act of seeing using our eyes. Who and where is this “I” we reference so easily in our everyday speech and thoughts? Can we find ourselves within our bodies springing out from a point of awareness?
Meditation
Once again look around you and find an object to look at for a few seconds. Now shift your awareness to your eyes. Imagine them for a moment — their color, their shape. Next, leave your imagination and return to looking with your eyes. Place your attention on yourself actually doing the looking. Notice that you are behind your eyes looking out at the world around you.
As the witnessing presence, observe yourself being this point of awareness looking out at the world. Allow your eyes to move from one object to another, while you also focus on the one looking, making no sound, watching from behind your eyes. Continue to keep your focus and attention on yourself as the awareness doing the seeing.
Stay with the seeing process for a while, keeping your attention on yourself as you are doing the seeing. Notice the stillness and silence of the process and the simplicity of yourself as the one seeing. That is you — silent, still awareness.
This can be tricky since it is not something we ordinarily do. Most likely it is a new experience, so give yourself time to get comfortable with it.
Inquiry
What can you say about yourself, the one you experienced looking out at the world from behind your eyes? What are you actually like? Can you begin to know yourself as still, silent awareness? How would you now describe yourself? Is your self-concept changing at all?

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Have you ever felt guilty about watching your favorite sporting event or drama instead of the documentary that you should be watching?
CNBC has created two environmentally relevant docu-reports covering the worldwide water shortage and trash/landfill problems that are so good you won’t mind missing the other stuff. Liquid Assets: The Big Business of Water and Trash Inc: The Secret Life of Garbage are in-depth original shows developed in-house at CNBC that will reward you with insights, interviews and data. Both shows move quickly and will leave you wanting more.
The water piece is downright scary, articulating what we all know deep inside: the Western U.S. is so beholden to the Colorado River that if anything goes wrong with it, and/or, we don’t as a nation learn how to truly conserve water, a crisis will be upon us and before we know it. Did you know it takes 3 gallons of water to make one piece of paper? Or that 118.8 gallons of water are used to process one six-pack of beer? How about 12.69 cups of water to produce one plastic water bottle?
A little-known but relevant case history is Chile. Reporter Michelle Caruso-Carbrera takes us there to see the driest place on earth, where not surprisingly, an old small town is dying by the day. Contrasted with, a truly free market for water which Chile claims is a big success for landowners, holders of water rights, business and consumers. CNBC raises the idea that markets not governments should control the flow of water, a provocative idea indeed.
The trash expose isn’t just trash talk, either. We see the largest trash removal operation in America, Manhattan, and how it disposes of 12,000 tons of trash per day. A lot of which is actually taken to landfills in other states by truck or train. Apparently Manhattan does a good job with its $1.3 billion annual budget, there just isn’t any place else to put the waste…
A genuinely disturbing investigation of trash accumulating unabated and unregulated in and around Beijing, China shows us one of the unfortunate byproducts of hypergrowth in a booming new economy. In general, a lack of adequate landfills and the difficulty in preventing seepage of trash and methane gas into the water table is explained clearly and succinctly by CNBC reporter Carl Quintanilla, who traveled to Beijing for the story. It makes you wonder how they managed to get this report past the Chinese government, which usually does not concern itself with “first amendment” rights when the publicity is negative?
There is hope, as evidenced by some of the scientists, students and entrepreneurs who are hard at work developing solutions for these problem areas. A surprise is former Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt, who served the Clinton administration, when he says we have plenty of water to sustain us indefinitely. I was aghast at this, although he does redeem himself somewhat by saying that farmers in particular need to be much more efficient in how they irrigate, as they are wasting almost 50 percent of the water used at present. Babbitt also favors free market pricing of water, which he thinks will eliminate water waste in a big hurry. Another surprise is the favorable treatment given to trash removal behemoth Waste Management, Inc. that is portrayed as a company spending major research dollars to make landfills better. Also featured is BMW’s Spartanburg, S.C. plant that devised an ingenious way to provide power from methane gas, which runs through a 10-mile-long pipeline, from beneath a landfill all the way to the plant’s generator.
So what can you do to help remedy these critical environmental problem areas? The answers come clear in both shows: conserve water, and recycle every bit of waste material possible. Recycling of plastic water bottles in particular is absolutely critical as only five percent of bottles consumed are currently recycled. There are a number of new companies that have made a business out of transforming used water bottles into tiny plastic chips that ultimately become fabric and other materials — plastic water bottles, for instance. And don’t forget home composting, which is not mentioned but is also critical in our waste reduction efforts.
CNBC typically airs these special shows a number of times so check your local cable company and/or the CNBC website for broadcast times. And again, kudos to CNBC for putting material like this on the air when unfortunately, middle America seems to prefer “Housewives of Orange County” and “Celebrity Rehab” to this type of programming.
Please post your comments once you’ve watched “Water” and “Trash” on CNBC. Thanks!

Follow Jennifer Schwab on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/SCGreen_Home

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

There is a huge national crisis that America is currently facing that has gotten very little recognition or attention.
That crisis is black teenage unemployment.
Put simply, we are facing something approaching a national emergency that goes well beyond the current unemployment rate in the recession or the more general economic dislocation that Americans have been facing recently. Any objective analysis of the data shows that for the vast majority of African Americans under the age of 21, there are simply no opportunities in our society; not only for advancement, but for any sort of survival.
The implications of this are ominous. Without any real opportunities to participate in American society, the alternatives are truly calamitous for young people and for society at large.
We are very fortunate to have avoided so far any social dislocation or unrest. But given the full dimensions of the problem, it is simply assuming too much to believe that we will be able to stay on the present course without some sort of catastrophic result.
Here is the data.
While our national unemployment rate is at 9.6%, African-American unemployment is notably higher at 15.6%. This is unacceptable and requires national attention.
However, most disturbing is that unemployment among black teenagers is an astounding 40.6%, and was as high as 50% last year. If discouraged workers – that is, those who have given up seeking employment – are also included in this calculation, the number of black teenagers without work rises to 70% – 80%.
This is what creates the national emergency that I speak of.
African Americans have long had the most limited job prospects of any ethnic or racial group in America. The black unemployment rate has been about 6.6% higher than the white unemployment rate since 1972. During a recession, when the likelihood of being unemployed increases 1% for whites, it increases 1.5% for blacks. The fact that the economy is not recovering as quickly as everyone hoped it would makes the situation only worse for blacks, and even worse still for black teenagers.
President Obama, the Democrats and the Republicans have all said nothing about this crisis. They are all participating in a conspiracy of silence regarding one of the central challenges facing our nation. But ignoring the severity of the problem does not make it go away; arguably, it makes it worse.
Having lower-income African Americans without work at the rates we currently see is a national embarrassment and indeed a crisis. Put another way, if there was urgency in bailing out big financial institutions, banks and car companies, how then do we say we cannot bail out our children, people who have had no opportunities for their entire lives? Indeed, with the recent celebration of the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, it is sad to have to realize that for so many African American youths in America, there is no dream, and there is no chance.
America needs a bold, national initiative to combat black teenage unemployment. This initiative has to be broad based and include people of all ideologies and all political persuasions.
What specifically needs to be done to address this national emergency?
It is clear that we have to take off our ideological blinders and consider ideas from the left and the right if we are to succeed.
First, we need a greater commitment to education and job training to better prepare and qualify people to work. The so-called shovel-ready projects that stimulus funds have gone to have not produced real construction work. While the current discussion on improving education is mostly about charter schools and vouchers that emphasize choice, we should instead focus on improving our trade and vocational schools so that people can learn the skills needed to work. Charter schools provide minorities with a better education and put them on a path to continue their education longer, but more importantly, trade and vocational schools would prepare minority teenagers for jobs that exist in IT, green businesses and other emerging areas. Vocational schools have ties to jobs in the fields for which the students are being trained, and would provide teenagers with an opportunity to have ongoing relationships with future employers. We must also encourage high schools to form private and public partnerships with local businesses specifically to offer job opportunities to minorities.
We should increase funding for minority-serving institutions and universities so that these teens are exposed to quality education beyond high school, which will offer them more job opportunities and make them more qualified for a diverse range of higher-paying jobs. We must develop targeted workforce development programs that place black workers into pipelines that lead to higher-paying industry sectors.
Further, we should provide blacks with opportunities for entrepreneurship and encourage entrepreneurship in minority areas. Business growth centers should be established in minority areas that offer business training, financial literacy instruction, mentoring, management counseling, financing and contract negotiation. Assistance must also be available in minority areas to facilitate access to funding available from Federal government programs and the private sector.
Jack Kemp understood that minorities often don’t have as much access to the same opportunities that are available to whites that would allow them to prosper economically. In 2008, Kemp said that “By giving people access to capital and allowing them to take ownership of assets, entrepreneurship will be encouraged and the cycle of poverty can begin to be broken. All persons should have the opportunity to go as high as their merit and determination can carry them.”
We need to provide blacks with the opportunities to become entrepreneurial. By encouraging an entrepreneurial ethic and supporting entrepreneurial training and policies that will help blacks use their own skills and aptitudes, jobs will be created and minority unemployment will decrease.
Another way we can get black teenagers working is by reducing the minimum wage so that employers will hire more people. Increasing the minimum wage does not move working families out of poverty. On the contrary, it discourages employers who are trying to meet a payroll from keeping low-wage workers employed, and certainly from hiring new ones. A higher minimum wage impacts those with the fewest skills or least experience the most, which often means teenagers looking for entry-level jobs. By lowering the minimum wage, or at least by establishing a teenage or sub-minimum wage, more young people will be hired and have the opportunity to learn how to be in the workforce in America.
I understand that people on the left will howl at the thought of decreasing the minimum wage. But teenagers who are on a ledge, are heading in the wrong direction, or are involved in unproductive or potentially criminal activity just need to be employed. If it takes reducing the minimum wage to get people hired, then we must do it. Practically, the risk to us of social unrest is too horrific to even consider.
Finally, we should implement policies aimed at encouraging employers to hire workers. We should provide a payroll tax holiday, tax credits, or compensation for businesses that hire new employees from areas with high teenage unemployment. The government should also offer tax credits for businesses that open in minority or low-income areas.
Hopefully, those on the progressive left will see the urgency in addressing this crisis in a multiplicity of ways, and those on the right will recognize that it is not just enough to cut taxes generally or to get rid of regulation. We have to target inner-city areas with high unemployment to prevent social pathology, unrest and social anomie.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

During the last 14 days the White House and President Obama have gone on the attack, and their strategy is pretty simple: “Let’s acknowledge the voter anger and make sure it gets funneled toward something else.” Thus we have seen political attacks on just about everyone–and everything–out there. The problem, though, is that voters aren’t angry with Karl Rove, John Boehner, the Chamber of Commerce or even the “undisclosed financing” of elections. Voters are angry about the economy and they have two devastating perceptions of this administration: voters think it is incompetent and that it has overreached over the past two years.
An even bigger problem for the White House is that voters may have already tuned the President out; virtually every possible metric used to evaluate the outcome of the midterm elections suggest a massive GOP victory. So let’s just come out and say it: there is no reason to think that Republicans will do any worse than 1994 (when they picked up 54 seats) and there is plenty of data to suggest that it will, in fact, be a better year for the GOP. Our projection–based on all current available data–is that the GOP will gain between 60 and 70 House seats in November.
The White House and Democrats want this election to be a “choice,” but midterms are rarely ever “choice” elections–that’s what Presidential elections are for. Instead, midterms are a referendum on the President and the party in power. So let’s look at the key metrics that we use to evaluate voter perceptions of the President and Congress:
President Obama’s approval rating is hurting Democrats across the country. According to Real Clear Politics’ average of public polls, Obama’s approval rating now stands at approximately 45%. Our analysis of national surveys suggests that Obama’s approval rating is closer to 42-43% with likely voters. More importantly, the President’s approval rating in key swing states that Obama and fellow Democrats won in 2008 is faltering. In Colorado, for example, Obama won 54% of the vote but no recent poll shows his approval rating higher than 45% with likely voters. That is one of the reasons that incumbent Democratic Senator Michael Bennet is in serious trouble. Or take Pennsylvania, where an average of the last five polls has Obama’s approval rating at 40%: Republican Pat Toomey leads Democratic Rep. Joe Sestak by six points. The pattern is consistent: almost every state where Obama’s approval rating is at or below 45% the GOP candidate is leading by 3-10 points.
The GOP lead on the generic Congressional ballot is unprecedented. Republicans now lead on the generic Congressional ballot by seven points (48% to 41%) according to RCP. Our analysis of likely voter surveys taken over the last 30 days has the GOP lead at +9. As we have said before, Republicans rarely–if ever–lead on the GCB. According to Gallup, in 1994 the two parties were tied on the GCB the week before the election. Republicans picked up 54 seats that year.
Congressional approval is catastrophically low and Democrats–not Republicans–will pay the price. Congressional approval is at 20% (according to the last Pew Poll). The last WSJ/NBC poll also had it at 20% (with 75% disapproval).
In terms of election “engagement,” Republicans far outpace Democrats this year. According to last month’s Pew study, 79% of Republican candidate supporters say they definitely will vote for their preferred candidate, while only 66 percent of Democratic candidate supporters say the same. Just as importantly, the same poll tells us that 64% of Republicans are “giving a lot of thought” to this election, compared with only 40% of Democrats. This gives the GOP a +24 margin. To give you some perspective, in 1994 the GOP had a +9 lead on this measure (51% to 49%).
Anger about the economy and the lack of jobs remains this election’s defining element. The LCG Anger Index is increasing as we move closer to election day. The current index stands at 261. It was 246 in May of this year, and in 1994 it was 245.
Election Projections
We are in agreement with several recent analyses suggesting that there are approximately 35-40 house seats that should be rated in the “toss-up” category. To simplify things we will refer to the RCP assessment that has 39 “toss-up” seats. They have identified 185 seats as either likely or lean Democrat and 211 as either likely or lean GOP. In each of the remaining 39 “toss-up” races the Republicans and Democrats have been polling within points of each other–many are within the margin of error. So let’s assume that these 39 races split 50/50, giving the GOP a 20-set pick up. That gives the GOP a 53-seat pick up and control of the House. But a more realistic analysis suggests that in this current environment–keeping in mind the above voting metrics and the GOP turnout advantage–the GOP will win approximately 70% of the toss-up seats. That would mean a total pickup of 60 seats. And then let’s also assume that Republicans pick up a few of the “lean Democrat” seats. Our sense is that in a true “wave” election the party with the lead, the enthusiasm and the turnout advantage will take 70-80% of the toss-up seats in addition to some of the seats that “lean” toward the other party. Using this formula, at this point in time it is our sense that the GOP will pick up a total of around 65 seats, giving the GOP control of the House (with 242 seats to the Democrats’ 185).
The Senate is easier to visualize but, in some respects, more problematic to project. We continue to believe that it will come down to the West Coast, with the races in California (Boxer and Fiorina) and Washington (Murray and Rossi) holding the key to a Republican takeover. We’ve put Connecticut in the Democrat column and have put the following in the GOP column: KY, MO, NH, PA and WI. The other four true toss-up states are West Virginia, Colorado, Nevada and Illinois, although there are signs that all four are trending GOP at this time. Assuming Republicans win all four of these toss-up states, that leaves the aforementioned two West Coast races. The GOP would have to win one of those “away games” to get to 51 seats in the Senate.
Thanks again to John Zirinsky and Peter Ventimiglia for their insights and contributions. For real-time reactions to events and more thoughts on the public opinion environment, please follow us on Twitter @lcgpolling.

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

The busy bees marketing the services of emergency helicopters have been spreading the pollen in Texas. I’ve wondered if the industry’s sales force was pitching the need for speed to summer camps ever since I blogged about the father of one camper in Texas who got hit with a bill for $16,000 after his daughter slipped in the shower and was airlifted to a children’s hospital with little more than a bump and a scare.
When dad asked the camp why he wasn’t called or consulted before the decision was made to bundle his little girl into the most dangerous kind of commercial air transport available, he was told he’d already signed a waiver allowing the camp to call a chopper if it deemed fit.
Now comes news that San Marcos Baptist Academy a private boarding school south of Dallas has signed “an athletic membership contract with Air Evac Lifeteam,” according to the community newspaper. I don’t think they’re the only school doing this. But I’ve got to wonder, “what can they be thinking?”
I sincerely hope that the athletes at San Marcos have no need of any kind of medical transport. But if past is prologue, having that chopper on standby is one hair-trigger decision away from having it dispatched to move an injured player. Undoubtedly, this membership contract is going to result in helicopter transports that are risky and unnecessary. How risky? You be the judge. Below is a list of accidents involving Air Evac Lifeteam helicopters over the past twelve years. I’ve provided a few details on the most recent accidents. But you can read more about any of them by clicking through to the NTSB reports.
Six weeks ago, at four in the morning, an Air Evac helicopter en route to pick up a patient crashed in Arkansas, killing the pilot and the two member medical crew. CEN10FA509.
On Christmas day 2009, another Air Evac helicopter lost engine power shortly after takeoff from a hospital helipad in Decatur, Texas. The pilot and medic were seriously injured. CEN10LA078
Seven months earlier an Air Evac helicopter made an emergency landing at 1:00 a.m. in Vick, Texas. An investigation determined an essential piece of the horizontal stabilizer was missing. CEN09IA254 There was a patient on board the flight, but thankfully there were no injuries.
August 31, 2008 in Greensburg, IN – Three killed CHI08FA269
December 30, 2007 in Cherokee, AL – Three killed NYC08FA071
February 21, 2005 in Gentry, AK – One killed three injured DFW05FA073
November 9, 2004 Sapulpa, OK DFW05LA019
April 20, 2004 Huntingburg, IN – One killed three injured CHI04FA107
November 28, 2003 FTW04CA030
September 20, 2003 Shoals, AL CHI03LA319
January 31, 2003 West Plains, MO CHI03LA062
November 8, 2002 Albany, KY IAD03LA015
June 9, 2002 Dover, AK FTW02LA176
January 22, 2001 Quincy, IL One killed CHI01LA070
May 24, 1998 Springdale, AK FTW98FA239
When Patrick Veillette and I were assembling our Comprehensive Air Medical Services database, we found that the eight hours between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. are the most dangerous hours to fly by helicopter medivac. Nearly half of all the EMS helicopter crashes take place during this time. Further, nighttime accidents are more likely to be fatal. Air ambulance accidents that occurred at night were almost four times more likely to result in fatalities than those occurring during the day.
But day or night, air ambulances have proven to be a tool best used judiciously. Unfortunately, the air ambulance industry shows no desire to slow its rapid growth so that in places like Texas, helicopter companies are literally falling all over each other to carry the injured and the nearly-so by air.
Enough may be enough. The optimist in me believes that when schools and summer camps realize the deal they have made with air transport companies could result in an athlete or camper joining the grim accident statistics, they will wise up and close the door to the opportunistic sales people buzzing to get in.

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