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IN TODAY’S RADIO REPORT: Steppin’ awaaay from the politics and midterm madness (almost…and just for today): Historic UN agreement on biodiversity; Establishing a price for “natural capital”; Halliburton’s bad cement job; Last call for Discovery … PLUS: Van Jones – The most positive man in America on the fight for clean energy … All that and more in today’s Green News Report!
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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

This article was originally written for the Common Ground News Service, a non-profit initiative of Search for Common Ground, an international NGO whose mission is to transform the way the world deals with conflict – away from adversarial confrontation towards cooperative solutions.
More than two thirds of the world’s population – over four billion people – identify with one religion or another. Imagine the motivational energy of these four billion people used as a positive force for global social change. Whether tackling issues of poverty, disease, health, energy, education, gender inequality or any urgent challenge facing our world today, the possibilities are endless with four billion minds and eight billion hands working together.
This is the potential power of faith.
Incredible, isn’t it?
Designing and developing a movement, a Global Interfaith Volunteer Corps, to professionally bring together members of different faiths in acts of public service internationally, nationally and locally is one possible way to spark this flame. The goal of such interaction is to demystify the “other” through joint engagement in activities and initiatives that benefit not only their own communities but also society at large.
Many believers already serve their communities and each other in a multitude of ways, such as volunteering at their local church, synagogue, mosque or temple. The Global Interfaith Volunteer Corps, however, would be aimed at a much larger concern brought upon our world by rapid globalisation. As the world becomes increasingly interconnected, tensions begin to flair. This mounting of tension was best described by His Highness the Aga Khan, leader of the Ismaili Muslim community and Chairman of the Aga Khan Development Network, at a recent speech on pluralism in Toronto:
“The variety of the world is not only more available, it is nearly inescapable. Human difference is more proximate – and more intense…. Almost everything now seems to “flow” globally – people and images, money and credit, goods and services, microbes and viruses, pollution and armaments, crime and terror. But let us remember, too, that constructive impulses can also flow more readily, as they do when international organisations join hands across dividing lines.”
Service on the basis of shared beliefs and common ethics can take the shape of local, national and international character. At the local level, multi-faith initiatives can be designed to engage with homeless shelters, heath clinics and special-needs schools. At the national level, joint action plans can be devised amongst faith advocates of all stripes to advance women’s rights, children’s education and environmental stewardship.
And at the international level, increased collaboration between faith-based humanitarian services, joint statements by different faith communities drawing attention to under-reported injustice and inequity, and inter-religious calls to drawdown global nuclear stockpiles are all possible when walls that divide are replaced with bridges that unite. Such multi-religious endeavours not only introduce one faith base to another, but they also build trust amongst different kinds of believers.
The idea of creating a Global Interfaith Volunteer Corps, then, is not simply about creating acceptance and shared religious understanding. It is also about ingraining a broader ethic of pluralism, of accepting and understanding difference – religiously, ethnically, culturally and linguistically.
The volunteer corps could serve as a global entity to increase collaboration amongst religious institutions, faith-based organisations and faith-inspired initiatives, ultimately becoming a forum from which pluralism of all sorts can develop and emanate.
A group of religious leaders could be appointed to local, national and international community councils of multi-faith action. These leaders must be courageous, open and willing to engage. Above all, they would need to set an example for their followers in both thought and action. Imagine these community councils replicated – town-by-town and city-by-city – across the country and around the world.
The differences among us, while important and pronounced, pale in comparison to our commonalities. Generosity, compassion, kindness, forgiveness, respect, charity and acceptance do not belong to any one religion, but are the raw materials that bind the fabric of our faiths together. This sense of shared commitment to the common good, guided by different religious traditions, is perhaps the biggest resource for meeting the challenges of the 21st century.
We must humanise each other’s beliefs by collectively engaging in active citizenship and service to others.
And we must start somewhere, for as famed cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead once said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
Cross-posted with RahimKanani.com

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

David Bismark demos a new system for voting that contains a simple, verifiable way to prevent fraud and miscounting — while keeping each person’s vote secret.
One of the main objections to e-voting is that it’s difficult for each voter to know that her vote was recorded accurately and counted correctly, while she remains anonymous. In the system designed by David Bismark and his colleagues, each voter gets a takeaway slip that serves as a record of the vote, and allows elections to be independently verified.
Apart from his work on voting systems, Bismark runs Recito Frlag, a publishing company in Sweden.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

So, Halloween was all go in NY. Brooklyn became a pumpkin field, a 13 foot spider scaled the brownstone opposite us and hundreds of shiny slutty costume shops popped up all over town.
However, in London there’s little orange nylon hysteria. People get a bit witchy and go to the pub, the goths are quite jolly, but no one really bats an eyelid. And no one dresses up as a bat. Or a viking, a cheerleader, Chilean miner or Charlie Sheen’s hotel room cupboard.
BUT. Not to be beaten. Although All Hallow’s Eve is less of an event in the UK, many other local traditional celebrations and rituals are observed throughout the year, especially in our smaller villages and backwaters. Not scary or ghoulish but steeped in Blackadder-esque British history, perhaps pointless or painful, often utterly daft. More entertaining than a dog in a Sarah Palin costume?
Four of our Weird & Wonderful Traditional British Folk Pastimes:
1. Cheese Rolling
Cooper’s Hill, Gloucestershire, UK. May.
Blessed are the Cheese Rollers. A cheese is flung down a hill, dozens of men chase it. Suicidally steep, the hill drops away at a 70-degree angle, plunges, levels out then plummets before suddenly flattening leaving chasers only a few feet to stop before crashing into a cottage fence at the bottom. Rugby players are on hand to try to catch them.
The 250-yard racecourse is, as Hobbes would say, nasty, brutish and short. Much peril awaits: ankle-twisting grass, leaf slime, gravel pits, Burgandy snails and duck’s nests. Walking is hard, running is crazy and chasing a cheese … well.
No one ever catches the cheese — it rockets down at nearly 70 miles an hour. “People literally fly through the air,” says Rob Seex, the current master of ceremonies. “It just looks insane. You will be amazed that people aren’t more seriously hurt than they are.”
The wheels of Double Gloucester weigh as much as a baby, eight pounds. Three inches thick and nine inches in diameter, they could be legally classed as missiles.
A blood sport of sorts, even innocent cheese watchers are often hurt by stray people and dairy. “That’s gotta be a bit of a whack,” says a contestant whose mother was hit in the leg by an errant cheese. “She had a huge bruise and couldn’t walk for a couple of weeks.”
Legend has it eight people were struck by lightning during the infamous 1982 cheese roll. The “Cheese Chase Chaos” of 1990 racked up some 22 casualties — including a grandmother, 59, knocked out by the deadly Double Gloucester.
2. Dwile Flonking
Bungay & Beccles, Suffolk, UK. August.
It takes a hero to dodge a dwile, avoid a wanton and score a swadger. Partly because who has a clue what any of it means?
Resurrected in the late 1960′s Dwile Flonking (or Dwyle Flunking) is an outdoor pub game of dubious origin but joyous originality. Does dwile flonking really date back to the Suffolk harvests of 400 years ago or is it just a good excuse for getting drunk and celebrating Christmas in August?
Dwile Flonking involves two teams of twelve, dressed in traditional and soon soggy folk costumes, who dance around the other in a circle while attempting to avoid a beer-soaked dwile (cloth) thrown by the non-dancing team.
– StrangeGames
The referee or ‘jobanowl’ decides who flonks first by tossing a sugar beet. The game begins when the jobanowl shouts “Here y’go t’gither!” Very Harry Potter, isn’t it? As if Lewis Carroll invented Quidditch.
3. Green Man Battling
Clun, Ango-Welsh Border. Early May.
An ancient pagan tradition from Shropshire. Basically, a bloke dresses up as a great big fecund Wood God and has a fight with the Frost Queen on a Bridge. Winner gets Spring.
- Clungreenman.com
Winter is banished and Summer welcomed by this re-enactment of the embodiment of the seasons, the festival also features juggling, duck racing & Morris dancing.
4. The World Gurning Championships
Egremont, Cumbria, UK. September.
Contestants put their heads through a horse collar and contort their faces into the most gruesome or daft expressions possible.
Originated at Egremont Crab Fair in 1297 (named after apples not custaceans) after Henry III granted this apple variety a royal charter, ‘gurning’ was born from expressions caused by the bitterness of the apples.
Other attractions at the contest include the rather literally named ‘climbing up the greasy pole to try and get the leg of lamb nailed at the top.’
According to the BBC, who follow the festival, using the horse collar frame is called “gurnin’ through a braffin’. Often the greatest gurners are those with no teeth, who can often lift their lip up over their nose, which has, apparently, led to many of the sports professionals removing their own teeth with pliers.
So, if Halloween didn’t spook you or your inner Jack-O-Lantern is all burnt out, hop on a flight over the pond and Flonk your Dwile to your heart’s content.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

(This story originally appeared at the website of the Columbia Journalism Review. )
A source provides details to the American government about the nefarious activities of a Middle Eastern country. That information ends up in scores of secret U.S. government documents. Subsequently, the information winds up on the front pages of major newspapers, and is heralded by war hawks in Washington as acasus belli.
Sound familiar? It should, but perhaps not in the way you’re thinking. Here’s a hint: It’s not 2003, but 2010. This is the story of what happened recently to Iran in the wake of the latest WikiLeaks document release, where U.S military field reports from Iraq made their way into major national newspapers and painted the Islamic Republic as a force out to murder U.S. soldiers in Iraq.
While the WikiLeaks document dump provided a useful way to glean historic details of the seven-year-old occupation, much of the prominent media coverage focused closely on the extent of Iranian support for anti-U.S. forces in Iraq and Iran’s alleged role.
“Leaked Reports Detail Iran’s Aid for Iraqi Militias,” blared the headline on afront page story inThe New York Times, which went on to report on several incidents recounted in WikiLeaks documents that journalist Michael Gordon called “the shadow war between the United States and Iraqi militias backed by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.”
“The field reports also provide a detailed account of what American military officials on the ground in Iraq saw as Iran’s shadowy role training and equipping Iraqi Shiite militias to fight the U.S.,” wroteJulian Barnes inThe Wall Street Journal. “American intelligence believed the training was provided not only by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in Iran, but also by Hezbollah, their Lebanese ally.”
And the hawks went wild.
Iraq war supporter andNewsweek Middle East regional editorChristopher Dickey wondered about the inevitability of the U.S. getting ready to “strike back with a vengeance.” Neoconservative journalist Jamie Kirchickwrote a piece on his Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty blog headlined “How WikiLeaks Makes Confrontation With Iran More Likely.” He went on to say that “what is now beyond dispute is that it clearly sees itself as engaged in a war against the United States.”
But, despite Kirchick’s assertions, the details in the WikiLeaks document dump were not actually “beyond dispute.”
TheJournal’s take hinted at the problem, and theTimes mentioned that the reports were based on events “as seen by American units in the field and the United States’ military intelligence.” These reports are accounts–and often single-source accounts–by U.S. military officials, based largely on unnamed sources whose motivations cannot even be guessed at, let alone their version of events confirmed.
“What the documents reflect is the American military’s view of what was happening,” NYU Center on Law and Security fellow Nir Rosentold the radio showDemocracy Now! “If they record a death, if they record a torture incident, then that’s a factual incident that occurred and we know it’s true historically.”
“But a lot of the other allegations about Iranian involvement or various plots, people have been giving them too much credence,” he continued. “The New York Times, for example, has been really celebrating the alleged role of Iran simply because American guys on the ground have been reporting the role of Iran.”
“This is the same American intelligence that thought Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and thought that Saddam had connections to September 11,” said Rosen, who just finished a second book chronicling his time in Iraq. “We need to be skeptical about some of the allegations.”
Indeed, if one amended the above opening paragraph to say, ‘the U.S. launched an invasion of said nefarious Middle Eastern country,’ this tale would obviously be the story of Curveball, the famously fraudulent defector source who provided details of Iraq’s alleged biological weapons program to German intelligence, which passed it on to their U.S. counterparts.
Curveball’s information made its wayinto 112 reports from the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency between January 2000 and September 2001. Eventually, Curveball’s story wound up in the controversialOctober 2002 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate, which omitted early warnings about Curveball’s reliability. The NIE was created to pass to Congress ahead of a vote to authorize force against Iraq, which Congress did. The false accusation about mobile biological weapons labs eventually made into President George W. Bush’s2003 State of the Union address and, just nine days later, in Secretary of State Colin Powell’saddress to the U.N. Security Council. Exactly six weeks after that, the U.S. launched its invasion of Iraq.
And now this drama is replaying with Iran at center stage. Given the intelligence debacle in the run up to the Iraq war, many observers are urging a more cautious reading of the intelligence reports contained in the WikiLeaks dump.
“The documents released by WikiLeaks are U.S. government documents produced by intelligence agencies and others and, as such, should not be accepted as confirming anything other than that the U.S. is producing information about Iran’s perceived role in Iraq,” said Joost Hiltermann, the deputy director of the International Crisis Group’s Middle East Program.
“It won’t take much to convince me, based on research in Iraq, that Iran has been playing a certain role in Iraq involving weapons supplies, armed attacks, war by proxy, and what have you,” Hiltermann continued. “But this is not the same as accepting intelligence documents produced by a party to the conflict between the U.S. and Iran hook, line, and sinker as incontrovertible proof that Iran has been doing x, y, and z.”
University of Minnesota professor William Beemanwrote on his blog that the documents do not constitute proof, but rather only give “verbatim internal reports” instead of broader accusations previously made by senior military officials in Iraq. The older allegations seem to have been based on the reports, but Beeman notes that “the evidence is no more compelling for its repetition.”
And at theForeign Policy Journal website, Jeremy Hammond, in the course of picking apart theTimes piece for inconsistencies,notes that the claim that some revelations were “broadly consistent” with other classified documents and official accounts–all of which would also come through the lens of the U.S. government.
“As for being ‘broadly consistent’ with public accounts by military officials, this is a meaningless statement from which no conclusions about the accuracy of the reports may be drawn,” continues Hammond. “After all, the infamous documents purporting to show that Iraq under Saddam Hussein had sought to purchase yellowcake uranium from Niger were ‘broadly consistent’ with public claims about Iraq’s possession and pursuit of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), but they were fabrications nevertheless.”
And therein lies the call for more caution in reading single-source U.S. government (in this case, military/ intelligence) reports–mistakes have been made before, and they left Iraq in a bloody shambles. Skepticism would be especially well-founded for theNew York Timespiece on Iran’s ties to the Shia insurgency in Iraq. Consider this sampling ofTimes articles on the subject, along with the bylines:
- “Iran Aiding Shiite Attacks Inside Iraq, General Says,” June 23, 2006, by Michael R. Gordon
- “Iran Ties Role in Iraq Talks to U.S. Exit,” December 10, 2006, by Hassan M. Fattah and Michael R. Gordon
- “U.S. Says Captured Iranians Can Be Linked to Attacks,” December 27, 2006, by Sabrina Tavernise with contributed reporting from Michael R. Gordon
- “Deadliest Bomb in Iraq is Made by Iran, U.S. Says,” Feb. 10, 2007, by Michael R. Gordon
- “U.S. Says Arms Link Iranians to Iraqi Shiites,” Feb. 12, 2007, by James Glanz with contributed reporting from Michael R. Gordon
- “Why Accuse Iran of Meddling Now? U.S. Officials Explain,” Feb. 15, 2007, by Michael R. Gordon
- “U.S. Says Raid in Iraq Supports Claim on Iran,” Feb. 26, 2007, by James Glanz and Richard A. Oppel Jr. with contributed reporting from Michael R. Gordon
- “U.S. Long Worried that Iran Supplied Arms in Iraq,” March 27, 2007, by Michael R. Gordon and Scott Shane
- “U.S. Ties Iran to Deadly Attack,” July 2, 2007, by Michael R. Gordon
- “U.S. Says Iran Helped Iraqis Kill Five G.I.s,” July 3, 2007, by John F. Burns and Michael R. Gordon
- “U.S. Says Iran-Supplied Bomb Kills More Troops,” August 8, 2007, by Michael R. Gordon
- “Hezbollah Trains Iraqis in Iran, Officials Say,” May 5, 2008, by Michael R. Gordon
Now fast forward two years, and we arrive at the article about the WikiLeaks document dump and Iran’s involvement in Iraq:
- “Leaked Report Detail Iran’s Aid for Iraqi Militias,” October 22, 2010, by Michael R. Gordon and Andrew W. Lehren
You might be forgiven for seeing a consistent pattern emerging here. And when you look at the two-year-long string of articles about Iran and Iraq listed above, with all those accounts from often unnamed U.S. officials, and then the WikiLeaks documents that bear out these anonymous accounts with more detailed anonymous accounts, you wonder if Gordon is not defending his own record when he wrote last month that:
Given that last clause, and in light of what happened in 2002 and 2003, you might even wonder if Gordon is reading the WikiLeaks documents cautiously enough and seeking out dissent. The least, it seems, we readers can do–maybe must do–is show some caution of our own in accepting these claims about Iran.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

In July 1974, a music journalist named Nick Kent, in the New Musical Express, tagged Keith Richards, the Rolling Stones co-foundation and guitarist, as “The World’s Most Elegantly Wasted Human Being.”
Richards had already emerged as a friend piper in rock, as a magnet for youth searching for a role model who could compete with them in the disaffection department. In the UK and the US, they took to his flippant disregard for authority, and the codes governing the usage of black market narcotics and illicit substances.
As a college freshman in 1988, I latched on to Richards as something of a role model. I dug his disdain, delivered with slurry confidence in press conferences, and shared his distaste for powers that be, who seemed to me to be enforcing rules merely because they could, with a foolish and pathetic consistency. Kids often gravitate towards people who shouldn’t be a role model for anything, frequently finding themselves entranced by adults — who are supposed to know better, right? — that mirror and bolster their own negative traits. So a Richards, who flaunts his indifference to laws, and order, and a boring old straitlaced existence, appeals to a rebellious youth who is looking for guidance on his journey out of adolescence. And if that youth tends to be easily wounded by the inevitable slings and arrows life aims at you, is acutely sensitive to psychic pain, and seeks to dampen the sadness and uncertainty with a pill, some powder or a puff, well, a Richards is a veritable GPS of a man.
‘Follow me, I have the map, I know the mechanism for coping. It’s not cheap, but it is easy, and trust me, you’ll feel nothing on the way.’
‘Follow me,’ easily led youths, like myself, tippable kids who didn’t need much of a nudge to pick the wrong methods to cope, heard Richards say when he flippantly assessed his use of heroin and cocaine and such, and made it seem like an acceptable, even sexy, choice of lifestyle to pursue.
Sure, he might throw in a disclaimer, but a tippable kid wouldn’t process the disclaimer when the rocker would answer, “It was a damn good feeling for starters” after being asked why he took heroin. An at-risk kid with a not-fully-formed brain, and a belief in his immortality, eats up the boasting of staying up for five nights.
He marvels at and wishes to replicate the badass buccaneer of rock’s ludicrously hardy constitution, and spits out, or glosses over the acknowledgement that Richards did overdo it, that use of heavy drugs is “probably not the best solution,” as he stated in 1999.
Now, at 41, with a brain closer to fully formed, I hoped when I heard Richards’ autobiography, Life, would be released that The World’s Most Elongated Adolescence would come to a halt. I hoped that at age 66, Richards have finally grown up, and refuted his former propensity for the glorification of hard drugs.
Shoot, I still like to be entertained, I wasn’t hoping that he’d share his exploits and anecdotes for 25% of the book, and then spend the rest of the time telling us about his experience in sobriety. Sobriety has worked for me, allowed me to traffic in reality, and be a fairly high functioning adult, with a wife, and two kids. But the day to day happenings of a Sober Joe who is simply trying to do the right thing isn’t probably the stuff of an autobio, LOL. I just hoped that Richards would finally realize that people, especially impressionable kids, do indeed look up to him, and some mimic his ways or the life he led in the 60s and 70s.
I hoped, but as I read Life I found myself disappointed.
The rocker still seems to miss the deadly seriousness of substance abuse, the catastrophic toll cocaine and heroin use, especially, take on users—and knock knock Keith, will you ever really wrap your brain around this?—the family and loved ones of users.
He uses that pet nickname for heroin, calling it “smack,” and that indicates to me that he’s still deluded on the issue. “Smack” is a pet nickname, and you use a pet nickname for your kid, or your wife, maybe. “It (heroin) is a seductress,” he says, through co-writer James Fox. “You can take that stuff for a month or so and stop.” And, then he allows, you could become “truly hooked.”
I dare say the number of people who can just dabble some, take it for a month and walk away, and never look back, are the exception. For Richards to even allude to that dabbling as being a possibility for anyone, is irresponsible.
He uses another nickname, “mainline,” when referring to the usage of a hypodermic needle to inject heroin.
We get it, you speak the language, you are in the private club, you know the secret password to gain your entrance Keith.
“The whole delicacy of mainlining was never for me,” he sniffs.
Delicacy?
Not sure what human pincushions he was hanging with, but there is nothing “delicate” about that habit. To someone not in that sad, sick milieu, watching a bunch of folks plunging needles into their arms, and then nodding off, spurs a wave of sadness, and maybe horror if you are needle-phobic.
I do realize I could be accused of parsing, of nitpicking, of being a killjoy buzzkill. But every word, said or written by such an icon is of vital importance. I go back to that tippable kid, that youth searching for answers, who might go the ‘Richards during the 70s’ route. I simply wish Richards and Fox were more in my camp than in the business of dressing up, sexing up, what is always a starkly grave matter. He can chuckle while talking about setting a bathroom on fire with a fellow user, as they both nodded off, but God forbid, what if the hotel went up in flames? Consistently, Richards leaves out the reactions, the anguish, of those caught in his wake, and it leads one to believe that like a teen, he is still caught up in his own head, believing the planets orbit around him, for his amusement.
Richards even touts heroin, saying it in “certain cases it helps you be more tenacious about something and follow it further than you would have.” If one single person is reading this and is tippable towards sobriety, please disregard this “heroin as tenacity builder” theory. Pure hogwash from Richards, who tells readers that he probably didn’t succumb to an OD because the stuff he scored was of the highest quality.
He does, to be fair, write that he is not trying to dress up the life of the drug addict. “(This is not) a recommendation…the life of a junkie is not recommended to anybody.”
After two steps forward, though, he hops a step back when he adds, “The key to my survival was that I paced myself.” That’s all well and good; he is entitled to his version of the truth. But forgive my repetition…what about the kid who doesn’t have a posse of handlers and bodyguards to dunk their OD’d ass into a tub of ice cubes to revive them, or bring them to a witch doctor to scrub their blood? A susceptible kid likens himself to Keef, and thinks “I too can pace myself” like Richards. I speak as one former fool who would pick and choose nuggets like this, and twist them to suit my own needs and whims.
The guitarist tells readers that, “I can improvise when I’m unconscious. This is one of my amazing tricks, apparently,” and I couldn’t help but be unimpressed. Listen, I have a couple greatest hits anecdotes from my stupid, self indulgent period, and I trot them out every now and again. Smoking up with Willie Nelson, for one. But I basically draw the line at weed tales; when you start boasting about your romance with heroin and cocaine, you aren’t sharing, you are fondly reminiscing, for effect and to score coolness points.
Keith, you are 66. Drug use fish tales cease being symbols of cool when you exit your teens, man.
“Most junkies become idiots,” Richards admits in “Life,” as he talks about his exit from the heroin hamster wheel. Then he erases his points for self awareness, as he tells us he only gave up cocaine because docs prescribed him blood thinners when he needed cranial surgery after he fell out of a tree in 2006. Sigh. And back in 2008, he told a writer that he “still smokes weed all the time.” So if anyone is thinking that Richards is a model of sobriety, or a success story, because he left heroin behind, I’d ask them to reconsider.
Keith Richards is a gifted guitarist, who quite likely, as was posited by former colleague Bill Wyman, suffers from considerable insecurity. He seems to be unable or unwilling to face life on life’s terms, without the aid of a dulling agent. And that’s his business, it’s not for Michael Woods to counsel the man on how to live. But when the man spins his yarns, and puts a cool sheen on substance abuse, and neglects to truly get what a toll it takes on poor souls, and the people who care about them, then he steps over a line. Like it or not, rock guitarists function as role models to kids. I’m not asking Richards to quit the Stones, and go on the road doing Just Say No speeches. But I’d love to see him, in the coming years, respect the power he has to influence kids who are searching for answers, and might look for them in a powder. He might find a deeper satisfaction in being a voice of reason than than in being the pre-eminent fried piper of rock and roll.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

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Walk of Fame star for Dern family
US actress Laura Dern and her parents, Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd, have become the first family to be honoured together on Hollywood's Walk Of Fame.
Laura Dern, who starred in Jurassic Park, said the star meant “the world to me and my parents and our children”.
She and Ladd made Oscar history in 1992 when they became the first mother and daughter to get nods at the same time – both for film Rambling Rose.
Bruce Dern was nominated for supporting actor in 1979 for Coming Home.
“I can't even begin to express the incredible good fortune I feel to love what I do and have found it,” Laura Dern said.
“There are two people I have to thank for that – I guess for my birth and also for the vocation. To my parents Bruce and Diane, who showed me the love and the passion for acting.”
Her mother, who has also been nominated for Oscars for Wild at Heart and Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, called her daughter “a miracle”.
She added: “God gave me a daughter and we ended up being the first mother and daughter in the world to be nominated for Oscars.”
Bruce Dern, who appeared in the films Coming Home and That Championship Season, said receiving a Hollywood star was “something that I never, ever thought would happen to me or that I could get”.

Source:BBC

There’s a small but incredibly telling scene in the new film Secretariat that has women of a certain age chuckling, somewhat ruefully, about how things used to be. Diane Lane, portraying the housewife-turned-sportswoman Penny Chenery, is trying to resuscitate her father’s moribund horse farm and so, being savvy, seeks the counsel of a well-placed Virginia businessman for advice.
To do that, she has no choice but to enter an all-male gentleman’s club at lunchtime, shocking the patrons and sending the lone female in the place, an unintentionally ironic sort of gatekeeper charged with keeping all other women out, into a tizzy.
Lane, unperturbed, takes her seat at the table, both literally and figuratively. The significance of this wasn’t lost on my daughters, aged 8 and 4, who took in the scene with a sort of curious bemusement.
“Why won’t they let her in, Mommy?” whispered my older daughter.
Why, indeed. I flashed back onto that moment in Secretariat when, the following week, I attended a new members’ reception for the Jacksonville Women’s Network, an organization first founded just a few years after Secretariat took the Triple Crown. The big issue of the day that sparked the club’s formation was the Equal Rights Amendment — and the order of the day was second-class citizenship for women everywhere.
As the JWN website points out: “In Jacksonville, the University Club was the only private club to allow women full membership. Not the River Club, nor the Yacht Club, nor Timaquana, nor the Seminole… why women were not even allowed to join the Civitan or Rotary Clubs! Women earned 57 cents for each 1 dollar men earned. Few women were members of the larger law firms since women had been admitted on an equal basis to the University of Florida Law School only during that decade. The “right to choose” … Woman’s right to a legal abortion had become a choice by the Supreme Court decision just five years earlier in 1973.”
And of course, there was only a smattering of women holding public office. The idea of a woman credibly seeking high office, or even the presidency, was laughable — literally.
Things would change very slowly. As late as 1982, Jacksonville’s River Club continued to exclude women, making headlines when freelance New York Times photographer Judith Gelber tried to enter the club to cover a meeting of bank executives and was promptly shown the door.
That’s why it’s all the more remarkable, as we watch the candidates for office around the country joust and jockey during this raucous midterm election, to notice two important trends.
First, women seem to have passed through a sort of political sound barrier. From Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina in California, to Nikki Haley in South Carolina, Alex Sink here in Florida, Linda McMahon in Connecticut, and many more — these candidates’ positions may be hotly debated by the voters, but no one is debating anymore their validity to run in the first place — and win. The 2008 election changed that calculus forever. Women are in the arena, and isn’t it about time?
Second, despite the slew of high-profile female candidates this cycle, independent analysts conclude that overall, women are slated to lose ground this election, with the percentage of women in Congress expected to decline for the first time in decades. And women who do run are often subjected to sexist media coverage and intense scrutiny of their appearance and personal lives, problems male politicians face much less frequently.
Still, the game has changed. It’s unlikely we’ll ever again see a scenario such as the one that occurred on Meet the Press during the 1984 campaign when Ted Koppel asked Geraldine Ferraro:
“Do you think that in any way the Soviets might be tempted to try to take advantage of you simply because you are a woman?”
After Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice, and Hillary Clinton, I doubt any journalist could ever credibly question a female politician that way again.
Jacksonville’s River Club, still a prime spot for power lunching, elected its first female president in 2006.
And in the darkened theatre, I whispered a muddled response to my 8-year-old: “Honey, men and women didn’t used to be treated the same the way they are now.”
“Well, that’s stupid!” she stage-whispered back.
That’s my girl.
To learn more about challenges and resources for women seeking public office, visit here.

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

When a story on microfinance appears in major media outlets, the effect on the public image of the sector can be dramatic. That’s why last Friday’s article in the Wall Street Journal, “India’s Major Crisis in Microlending,” requires a response.
The story covers a microfinance crisis in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, triggered by sensationalized newspaper accounts of suicides among over-indebted clients of some of India’s biggest microfinance institutions (MFIs): SKS Microfinance, Spandana, Share, and others. These cases underscore rising debt stress among possibly tens of thousands of clients, brought on by explosive growth of microfinance organizations in southern India. In the quest to meet their growth targets, loan officers often sell loans to clients already indebted to other organizations. The reports offered an opening for the state government, which runs a rival self-help group (SHG) program, to pass a restrictive ordinance severely curtailing the MFIs. The crisis threatens microfinance not only in Andhra Pradesh, but nationwide, as the Reserve Bank of India moves toward removing the priority sector designation that has fueled the sector’s growth (by making it advantageous for banks to lend to MFIs).
The blame for this unfortunate situation falls most squarely on the MFIs that failed to restrain aggressive growth even as the market became increasingly saturated. Investors must also swallow a big spoonful of blame. Becausethey paid dearly for shares in the MFIs, they need fast growth to make their investments pay off.
The divvying up of blame doesn’t stop there, however. Perhaps the most important target is the public sector policy environment that has treated microfinance institutions as orphan children of the financial sector rather than helping them to build solid foundations. In fact, the environment in which MFIs have grown up could almost have been expressly designed to promote over-lending.
The story starts from the nationalization of banking that was part of Indian socialism until the reforms at the end of the 1990s. The legacy of that era remains as a preferential relationship between the Indian banking authorities and their big, sluggish children: the public sector banks. Banking policy tends to be crafted with the public sector banks in mind, creating a strange mix of incentives for other types of providers.
Most importantly, although large MFIs were allowed to convert from non-profits to commercial institutions, they were not licensed to take deposits, in part because they would have become competitors to the public sector banks. Deposit-taking, properly supervised, would have allowed the MFIs to raise funds locally, both from clients and others in their neighborhoods. It would have created a balanced portfolio of products and revenue sources, rather than exclusive reliance on the micro-loan mono-product. Instead of unbalanced mono-product giants, MFIs like SKS might have grown up to look more like Mibanco in Peru, Equity Bank in Kenya or BRI in Indonesia, all with solid loan and deposit bases. When clients have a place to save (and banks have an interest in promoting savings) they may be less likely to fall into debt traps.
Next, Indian policies have led to poor governance frameworks for MFIs. In many countries, leading microfinance organizations like Mibanco and Bancosol (Bolivia) were commercialized with a mix of owners including the original non-governmental organization (NGO), international social investors (including development banks), and some local shareholders. The NGOs kept the focus on the mission, while the international social investors contributed a commercial orientation, also tempered by social mission. In Indian microfinance, NGOs are prohibited from becoming shareholders. Instead, authorities accepted a romantic notion that client ownership would create grassroots accountability, but this actually created a governance void. SKS, for example, established a client trust that gave clients a monetary stake in the company but left the voting rights to the founder/managers. At the same time, foreign investment rules have made it hard for international social investors to participate in ownership and governance. The results: founder domination, a pattern that affects each of the big three MFIs in Andhra Pradesh and leads to a lack of checks on decisions by managers, and the entrance of pure commercial players like Sequoia Capital India with their over-emphasis on fast growth.
Add to this the government support for the self-help group movement, which has been a very important success story, but which has received preferential treatment. In Andhra Pradesh, the SHG program received millions of dollars from the World Bank, facilitated by the Indian government. Nothing wrong with that, except that it created a preference for SHGs over MFIs throughout the state government.
The sole direct support from the Indian government to the MFIs, the priority sector lending targets, actually contributed to the excessive growth. It prompted the public and private sector banks to make large loans to MFIs with relatively little scrutiny, allowing MFIs to grow quickly without enough ballast in the form of institutional capacity building or a solid capital base.
As a finishing touch, one could cite the undermining of the MFIs’ legitimacy in the public eye created by government’s vacillating stances toward interest rates and occasional politically-motivated decrees of debt forgiveness.
This range of policies results from a combination of complex factors, and is much influenced by India’s socialist history and popular politics. Many leaders within both the Reserve Bank of India and the Ministry of Finance have sought to create a better policy environment.
The crisis of the moment has, correctly, focused attention on modifying specific lending behaviors: restraining growth, instilling better client protection practices, developing credit bureaus. However, at the same time, there’s an opportunity now for Indian policy makers to think more deeply about the role of MFIs in the financial sector. If they welcome the contribution MFIs can make to reaching the poor with financial services, they could begin to craft a set of ground rules that promote balanced product offerings, solid institutional development and good governance. Then perhaps we could talk about sharing the credit rather than the blame.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

It’s Election Day and with the polls still open, pundits aplenty are predetermining the election outcome as a pack, with few free thinkers straying from the herd. But the voters must still have their say. I’ve been on the phones nonstop with organizers in the field and their refrain, especially in the west is this: don’t suppress us with your punditry, let our people vote.
Predictions of electoral conclusions are sounding like the run-up to the Iraq War — the beltway brain trust reached a consensus and that was that. Brave Democrats who spoke out (including half the House Democratic caucus) and expressed what many in the country were thinking — wait a second, where is that coalition of the willing? Will we be greeted as liberators? Where are the WMDs? — were roundly criticized by the wise men (and women). But in the end, results were not as the beltway brain trust presumed, and the media roundly criticized itself for not being more skeptical. They didn’t fire anyone for being wrong — or change their ways — because here they go again.
The same groupthink is at play with today’s election. Already pundits have decided that the race is over so why bother fighting the tide? Friends working with new and old media outlets told me today they are are fighting the push for a “what does it all mean?” meta-conclusion come 8pm Eastern — with millions of Americans yet to vote. I think we must challenge this groupthink and let our people vote!
First, the obvious: I’m a California Democrat and I want my team to win. I think we can win despite our underdog status because our candidates have the talent and character to grit out victories just like my underdog World Champion San Francisco Giants did last night. I don’t want to hear anyone — especially not a Democrat or a progressive website — suppress votes by saying the election is over while polling places are still open.
Second, Americans have tight races across the country, especially in the West — Alaska, California, Colorado, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington State — that could be decided by one vote per precinct. That potential voter should not come home from work at 6 or 7pm only to hear from the punditry that their vote won’t matter because “we” already know the outcome.
Third, Latino voters already insulted by the GOP’s “Don’t Vote” ads will cast most of their ballots in communities west of the Mississippi . If the elections are deemed over at 5 or 6pm western and mountain time, the pundits delivering meta-conclusions will be no better than the “don’t vote” ads crowd they roundly criticized two weeks ago.
Anyone who’s ever walked a precinct with an hour to go and heard a voter say “it’s over — they called it” knows exactly why we must push back against the groupthink and let all Americans from sea to shining sea let their individual voices be heard. We’ll have the rest of our lives to discuss what our votes meant — till the polls close, let’s use the national microphone to get our votes cast.
And now back to the phonebanks …

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Have you seen the Forbes list of “The 100 Most Powerful Women”? Have a look and see that over 50 percent of the women on the list are women in their 50s. And if you count the ladies that are over 49 years old but under 62 years old, the percentage of powerhouses in that age group goes up to well over 60.
How fantastic is this piece of news? C’mon girlfriends, break out the champagne: we have arrived. The 50-something-year-old woman has huge personal power, both financially and in positions of corporate and political international leadership. What we are witnessing is monumental. It is all about smart, passionate women seizing their power and activating the energy they possess to make unstoppable change.
After spending much of her earlier years nurturing others, the 50-year-old woman is learning to nurture herself and sustain the stamina it takes to achieve remarkable levels of stature and influence.
Fearless, the 50-year-old woman has collected the courage, strength and inspiration over the course of her professional and personal journey to know what she wants and how to get it.
It is not at all surprising to see the range and variety of professions and positions that the Forbes list of women comprises. Fashion, business, politics, art, athletics and television blend nicely with some finance and philanthropy choices. They are a well balanced bunch of high-powered and influential sisters.
I have never felt so proud to find myself in this age group mix. Yet we all know that what the power women are seizing is no luxury. Every one of the women whose face appears in the roster has spent years working tirelessly to get where she is today. It is a definite choice of discipline and determination to stay the course. And we know it wasn’t easy. It is no secret that there are huge numbers of talented, deserving women who are not afforded the same opportunities for advancement or who unexpectedly meet the glass ceiling in their careers way before they reach their personal limits.
It is with those less fortunate in mind that I am very grateful to have a moment to honor and acknowledge “The Forbes 100 Most Powerful Women” for their individual success and achievement. Reading about the women on the Forbes list makes the possibility of grabbing your own personal ring just that much more within reach.

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ABC News just announced that they’ve rescinded their invitation for Andrew Breitbart to be any part of their election night coverage. This comes directly after ColorOfChange.org and CREDO Action members signed more than 125,000 petitions and made more than 2000 calls to leadership ABC and their parent company Disney (in just over 2 days).
ABC had already said Breitbart won’t be appearing on the air — now they’ve told him he’s not welcome to appear online either.
This is a huge victory against Breitbart’s brand of race-baiting propaganda and lies, and it couldn’t have happened without the quick and powerful outcry from thousands of us all across the country.
Here’s the press release that ColorOfChange.org and CREDO Action just sent out:
Here’s ABC’s letter to Andrew Breitbart:

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

A distance of thousands of miles and two worlds — since South Asians are known as third world populations — enables one to remove the hazy goggles and see with a bright, and clear view. Americans will have already selected the next Congress by the time this piece will appear on The Huffington Post. If one believes the projections, Republicans have great chances of sweeping the polls.
Their victory has already been accepted by the Democrats and that is a great aspect of a functioning democracy. Until this point, America represents a very modern nation as the opposition party is expected to make it big and the ruling party is not crying foul. This path to victory, however, is tainted with third world shenanigans. What Americans have not seen since the start of this campaign? They have seen allegations of the basest kinds, free trades of slurs of all kinds and proportions, and a general aversion to propriety.
These are but a symbol of third world countries where poor literacy rates, extreme corruption, and a general sense of despair runs deeper. Why is it that US politicians are falling to the same levels as those of Pakistani politicians?
While the American military-industrial complex is stronger, its influence is a pittance when compared to the all-powerful Pakistani military. While political parties in the U.S. are not angels, they are still much better than ours. Given the pervasive corruption in Pakistan and other third world countries, one can expect a rotten political system. It appears that the Republicans in the US are taking a lead from us as they are blocking every move by the Democrats, irrespective of the fact that most, if not all, had obvious merits.
Here is to hope that the Republican takeover will not cause a major dent in the first-world “ranking” of the country. The world is watching closely.

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

The best view of the red carpet, I realized, was from above. Browsing the bleachers a full hour before even the press arrived for The Rome Film Festival’s world premiere restoration of La Dolce Vita, I decided, finally, on a front row seat next to a shrunken woman of about seventy. Surrounded by blankets and snacks and cigarettes, she looked like she had been waiting all day. “No Scorsese?” she asked as I sat down beside her. (Scorsese was scheduled to introduce the film.) I told her it was still early. He’d be here. Disgusted, she threw up her hands. “No Scorsese, no cinema!” I’m not quite sure I agree, but it’s hard to disagree.
Fifty years after La Dolce Vita’s original release, the film has been restored from its original widescreen negative for the clean up of a lifetime. The premiere, which was itself a thing out of Fellini — from Nino Rota on the loudspeakers to the paparazzi on the floor — saw an avalanche of beautiful stars that all looked liked twins, save for one. Early in the parade, before things got too frenzied, a black car stopped as close to the carpet as it possibly could, a policeman flew to the door, opened it (slowly), reached in, and out came a cane, a foot, and then the rest of Anita Ekberg. The place went nuts.
As the new stars began to appear, with their smiles and waves and tastefully torn clothing, the mighty Ekberg limped wryly toward the press line, accentuating every labored step with a grande sigh. She had a lot of carpet to walk, and watching her fight it, prodding it with her cane and laughing all the while was a thrill even the most immaculately restored La Dolce Vita would not likely upstage. Moreover, Ekberg was the only woman on the red carpet with a purse slung over her shoulder, as if she had just came from lunch. How could you not love that?
I moved inside the theater to watch the rest of the arrivals on the big screen, in close up. There I rediscovered Ekberg’s entire face. Tickled, I found her jack-o-lantern smile, enormous eyes, and high-pointed eyebrows told of a darker, wittier person than I remembered from the movies. But I have a good defense: after the Trevi Fountain scene, all you can do is remember the Trevi Fountain scene.
The camera then drifted away from Anita (what would have Fellini have done with a Steadicam?) to Scorsese, and the entire theater erupted in applause and cheers, and then immediately hushed to hear what he had to say. At that moment someone behind me whispered, “You don’t have to be tall to be big.” In other words: No Scorsese, no cinema.
Once the little giant entered the building, things started to move quickly. There were a few introductions and some clips before Anita Ekberg was brought out on stage (with purse) to remember the filming, which she did with sardonic glee. I’m not sure, but she may have cackled. In fact, Ekberg got so gleeful she didn’t even see the cortege of stagehands that had gathered to signal her time was up. So she went on, gleefully, and as her enthusiasm grew, they moved closer, until finally the cluster was on stage, practically standing beside her. Even then she didn’t see them. So deep was her Fellini trance, they had to literally, almost physically, interrupt her sentence to bring her back to the present. It was glorious.
Then Scorsese. Watching La Dolce Vita, he said, is like the dream sequence — Guido freefalling — that opens 8 . “You feel like you’re flying,” he said. “At times it’s frightening or even terrifying. But at the same time it’s liberating.” In other words, no Fellini, no cinema.

This Blogger’s Books from
A Splurch in the Kisser: The Movies of Blake Edwards (Wesleyan Film)
by Sam Wasson
Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman
by Sam Wasson

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I must be crazy.
It’s well below freezing, and the air is so thin that we have to stop every few steps to breathe. I’ve never been more tired.
Childbirth was easier. We haven’t showered in days. Our clothes are filthy, and this is the vacation of a lifetime.
My daughter Reggie and I were in Tanzania on our way to the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, which at 19,340 feet is Africa’s tallest peak and one of the Seven Summits that draw climbers from around the world.
Because reaching the top of Kilimanjaro doesn’t require technical climbing skills, the climb is attracting growing numbers of inexperienced hikers like us. The holidays are the one of the busiest times on the mountain.
Many people who lose thirty five pounds would splurge on a new wardrobe. I opted for this adventure — one I could share with my daughter before she left for college.
That was six years ago and I’ve traveled the world since. Still, our Kili Climb remains one of the most memorable trips we’ve ever taken. And, of course, we weren’t nearly as worried about getting to the top before the glacial ice completely disappears. (We traveled with Boston-based Thomson Safaris — I knew owners Rick and Judi Wineland had climbed Kili with their teenaged daughters too.)
Reggie near the summitt of Kili
As with many adventures, of course, this trip was about more than just getting to the top. For Roland, the eldest in our group, a 71-year-old surgeon, the climb was about showing himself and his family that he was fit and healthy again a year after quadruple-bypass surgery.
For Lisa, a 45-year-old Boston advertising executive who had never tried anything as physically challenging as this, the climb was about bonding with her 17-year-old son John.
Three fit friends in their 50s from Ark. — Bill, Drew and Steve — simply wanted to test themselves in a new way.
I wanted to do something that would take Reggie and me completely out of our comfort zone (me more than her, as it turned out.)
It took thirty seven porters, four guides and two cooks to get us and our gear up to the summit and down again over the course of six days.
Balancing baskets on their heads, they raced up the mountain like billy goats so that they could set up camp each night before we arrived.
“Jambo, Jambo,” which means “hello” in Swahili, they’d say as they passed us on the trails or woke us in the morning with steaming-hot mugs of tea.
There is always a risk involved in traveling with strangers, because you never know what sort of people you’ll end up with. But our group bonded quickly, sharing jokes and encouraging one another up rocky, dusty trails that were sometimes so steep, we’d look back down and be amazed at the pitch we’d just conquered.
Perhaps it was the shared goal, or maybe it was the close quarters (our tents were so close that we could hear each other’s conversations), but we all found ourselves confiding intimate details of our lives to each other as the days progressed.
We’d start out early in the morning, talking and full of energy, but after hiking for as long as ten or twelve hours, we’d be like kids, asking our head guide Wilfrid “How much longer?” until camp. He’d never say.
This was hard work even for Reggie, a high school athlete who’d run a half-marathon a few weeks earlier without training.
We camped most nights at over 12,500 feet. Our hearts beat fast when we stood up. The higher we went, the colder and more barren it got. Each day was harder than the one before. At many points, the trails were rudimentary at best.
But nothing really prepared us for the final push to the summit. We left camp just before midnight, with only our headlamps to guide us. It was so cold that we could see our breath.
“Pole, Pole” (“slow” in Swahili), the guides kept telling us as we made our way around switchbacks and up sand slopes that were as steep as a ski mountain. We were walking so slowly that we looked like sleepwalkers.
I’d hoped Reg and I would make it to the summit together, snapping photos of our triumph. But life with kids, whether on a mountain or at home, seldom turns out as planned. Reggie reached the summit late that morning with another climber and a guide far ahead of me.
Beyond exhaustion, I stopped 300 feet lower, at Stella Point.
We congratulated each other later. “I’m really proud of you!” Reggie told me.
As the climb progressed, we became two equals seeking a goal rather than a mother and daughter. I helped her when she was altitude sick; she unrolled my sleeping bag for me at night when I was too exhausted to move. I reveled in seeing my daughter as a young woman up to any challenge. She’d never seen me push myself so hard physically. By the time we got back down that mountain, We respected each other in new ways.
In the years since, we’ve each looked back on how we navigated that challenge when we’ve faced tough situations. We showed each other we’d always have each other’s back — as adults.
So what if we didn’t get that picture together.
We came home with what really mattered.
Eileen Ogintz interviews families and experts around the world for her widely syndicated column Taking the Kids and is the creator of www.takingthekids.com She’s written seven family travel books, most recently The Kid’s Guide; NYC and The Kid’s Guide: Cruising Alaska. For more Taking the Kids, visit www.takingthekids.com and also follow TakingTheKids on twitter and like us on Facebook, where Eileen welcomes your questions and comments.

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To world traveler Chris Burget, every minute of one’s life should be an adventure. So he launched Bulls and Beavers, a fantastic online resource for the active outdoorsman. However, when he connected it to the excitement and global reach of Twitter, it became a social media success.
Burget has tapped into the outdoorsman market with a vengeance. He’s done the research, and the outreach, and the results have been quite favorable. This has led to great partnerships with companies, and great appreciation for his content from conservation groups.
This all shows what is possible when businesses place a “targeted social media” strategy in their overall promotional efforts. Respected for his creative approach and energetic presence, Burget envisions an even bigger role for Bulls and Beavers going forward. He was kind enough to share his thoughts with me in a recent interview.
Chris Burget, Publisher of Bulls and Beavers
The “Outdoor Sportsman Culture” is huge business. How are using Twitter and social media to take advantage of that market?
I am a firm believer that the true heart of social media is the desire to share a story, to bond with others who posses similar passions and new adventures. This is my simple vision for Bulls & Beavers. I had a burning desire to share my enthusiasm and respect for nature and the outdoor sportsman lifestyle.
In the beginning, as a novice blogger, I wrote about interests and issues that were near and dear to me; things like the meaning of hunting as a tradition handed from generation to generation, as well as heate topics on current conservation issues such as protection of the grey wolf and wild horse round ups.
As my knowledge of blogging grew, I naturally encountered Twitter and found that my stories and articles resonated with the readers. From these readers came the organic, exponential growth which has now resulted in Bulls and Beavers being the number one followed Twitter account for fishing and hunting with over 20,000 engaged followers.
I like how your site embraces conservation. Certainly, as Rochelle Veturis and Olivia Zaleski point out, how we take care of our planet is one of the great issues of our time.
One of the things I am most proud of with respect to our Bulls and Beavers community is that readers of the blog consistently discuss multiple sides of complex outdoor issues with intelligence and respect.
As a nature lover, hunter, and entrepreneur, I understand and try to always communicate that the outdoor sportsman lifestyle has both impact upon, and great responsibility for the stewardship of natural resources and wildlife populations.
Our core site visitor, the outdoor sportsman or woman is an intelligent, enthusiastic, reflective and educated individual who has a sincere desire to enjoy his or her current passions, and works to ensure that those passions are available for future generations. Our readers understand that natural ecosystems are clearly impacted by the presence of man and when specie populations fluctuate there is a clear ripple effect.
Great story behind the name ‘Bulls and Beavers’. Can you explain that for the readers?
The name is an interesting story with its roots grounded in homage both to my mother and father. As a young child, my dad would take me hunting for wild boar, deer and elk and deep sea salmon fishing. Before each hunt he would speak to me about respect for nature, as well as the skill and patience needed. To track a bull elk is to pursue one of the most regal and majestic creatures. This equals the bull component of the name in essence which represents not only wonderful memories with my dad, but also a deep reverence for nature and hunting.
While many people understand the icon of the majestic bull, fewer understand the rationale behind the beaver half of the logo. My maternal great-grandfather’s company, Shea Construction, is a prominent company that has been involved in some iconic construction projects such as “The Golden Gate Bridge” and “The Hoover Dam.” The construction industry’ highest award for quality is called The Golden Beaver Award, which relates back to the Hoover Dam. To me, the beaver not only represents the industrious, likeable ecosystem builder, but it represents the “Best of the Best” which is an award given by Bulls & Beavers.
Where is your corporate headquarters?
I love answering this question. Well, prior to founding Bulls and Beavers, I had a very successful career in high-end home sales in both Colorado and Southern California. About 12 years ago I purchased a 2,000 sq. ft. cabin on the Big Lost River in the rugged mountains of central Idaho. This became my mental and physical escape and vacation spot from the demanding corporate sales regimen.
Three years ago, through the miracle of telecommunications, the cabin received the ability to have high-speed internet access. During this time, I often found myself day dreaming about my own serene riverside oasis and felt an ever-increasing desire to be based there full time. With laptop in hand, I took a relocation leap-of- faith and developed multi media outdoor brand, Bulls & Beavers, and began my first blog posts.
So, now my 2,000 sq. ft. cabin has conveniently turned into the corporate headquarters for Bulls and Beavers! Board meetings consist of a couple lounge chairs river-side, an ice chest full of cold beverages and some lucky fishing poles. When we convene for a lunch break or afternoon snack, it usually includes trying out a new bow and arrow, a game of horseshoes, or the occasional shooting contest.
Events at corporate headquarters are best described as harmonious gatherings of friends and family with sounds of children’s laughter, the beauty of Idaho nature, and the warm feeling in one’s soul of living the dream envisioned, and don’t forget the s’mores. (Laughs)
To learn more about Chris Burget and the exciting world of camping, hunting, fishing, and the full range of the great outdoors, log on to his great website.

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In the first post of a two-part series, Daniel Berger explains how we got where we are.
Regardless of the outcome of the 2010 elections, the Democratic Party urgently needs a fundamental reevaluation of its political strategy. The 2008 election of Barack Obama could have been a watershed event in U.S. politics — not unlike Reagan’s election in 1980, which initiated the 30-year political dominance of the Republican Party. It still could be.
Obama won a substantial majority based on a strong showing among young people, minorities, and other voter groups far outside the Republican political base and ambit of influence. Together with a narrow plurality among independents, Obama’s vote — if replicated in future elections — could represent a durable, long-term majority. Moreover, as a result of Obama’s election, the Republican Party has splintered into two factions: an extreme mainstream and the ultra-extremist Tea Party. This opens up the possibility of a complete marginalization of the Republican Party to permanent minority status if the Democrats can co-opt its moderate element and demonize its extremes.
But Democrats have had difficulty capitalizing on an apparent fundamental shift in the political landscape. They are actually struggling to maintain political control, even though the major problems facing the nation are directly attributable to 30 years of Republican neglect and misrule. Despite legitimate efforts by the Administration to begin to address these problems, Obama and his allies on Capitol Hill are being blamed for them.
Notwithstanding the role of the Republican Party and its destructive policies, which are directly responsible for current conditions, any rebuke which the Democrats receive in the elections would also be a direct product of the Party’s own ineffective political strategy and that of the entire progressive political movement.
It is almost inconceivable that, during the worst economic conditions in 80 years, a conservative populism has arisen which, among other things, calls for the abolition of the national government. This comes after a recent collapse of private sector economic activity that caused mass unemployment. It required the national government to be the spender of last resort to stave off an economic catastrophe and support a slowly recovering economy. Eighty years ago, parallel conditions (which, left unchecked by the national government, spiraled out of control into the Great Depression) ushered in a progressive political movement responsible for the greatest era of political, social and economic reform in the history of the country. The 20th Century became the American Century and the U.S. was admired, even revered in the world.
Yet where is progressive populism now? Why haven’t masses of workers; members of the middle class who are unemployed, underemployed and underpaid; and their allies staged mass rallies to protest the behavior of Wall Street? Where are protests against the business sector for overdoing layoffs, or at least against the Tea Party, the intellectual and political successors of the Ku Klux Klan?
At the very moment of recent political triumph for the Democratic Party and its progressive allies, at a moment in which the nation, for the first time in 30 years, has begun to take action to address its fundamental problems, all progress could be quickly lost in the 2010 elections.
The nature and intensity of the opposition make clear that differences between the two parties now do not reflect competing visions of the future, but rather represent the future versus the past and reasonable change versus the entrenched, and often corrupt, status quo. Normally — particularly in a moment of crisis — the political argument in any rational political system would be resolved (as it was here during the Depression years) in favor of the future. So why are we now deeply worried that the argument will be resolved in favor of the past?
The Limits of Current Strategies of Democrats/Progressives
The Democrats seem currently to be following these discrete — sometimes overlapping — political strategies. First, apparently both the White House and the Democratic Congress believe that decades of ideological warfare between liberalism and conservatism has sickened the voting public to this type of conflict and has opened the door to a non-ideological political appeal. Such an appeal could presumably identify a set of problems requiring the collective attention of the country and develop a corresponding set of policy solutions based on the best available information and ideas, whatever their ideological origin. This could be called “policy approach” to politics.
While a policy approach is a good approach to governance, its effectiveness as a political strategy is questionable. The problems facing the country are complex. Unfortunately, issues that are poorly understood — or even inaccessible to the public — are easy targets of demagoguery and outright falsification (as the recent “debate” over health care showed).
This is particularly true in the current 24/7 media environment, where any proposed idea is intensively scrutinized — and inevitably distorted — by the media. As a result, public support for any policy proposal must be established at the very outset of its consideration and at every step along the way. But this is impossible in the current environment, where the Republican Party isn’t committed to a good faith discussion and resolution of differences. Thus, any policy proposal can be effectively derailed (or even demonized) if it is not shielded by an aggressive countervailing public relations campaign.
A second strategy which the Democrats seemed to have adopted has been referred to as “centrist.” Until recently, conventional wisdom has held that any political party must move to the center to establish and maintain political support. The Democratic Party represents 25-40% of the electorate. The liberal base is even smaller. So the leadership reasons that it must appeal to moderates and independents to win elections. While liberals, moderates, and independents largely agree on social issues, they disagree — sometimes sharply — on many other issues. As a result, Democrats have to straddle the fence between these factions. On policy issues they have had to settle for the most modest form out of fear of losing support among “moderates.” They can never address the fundamental causes of a problem without worrying about alienating a group, nor can they articulate a general guiding principle. Thus, Democrats can never adequately explain the true nature of a problem and why action is necessary, so they seem to act out of political opportunism rather than principle.
All this creates profound unease with the largest faction of the Democratic Party, the liberal base. For these reasons, Democrats wind up rarely appealing to them and almost appear to be running away from them.
The President has a related, but discrete, problem. He was elected in large part by young people and minorities, who not only provided votes but also idealism, energy, and grassroots organization. Obama has seemingly deserted this base by not focusing, at least rhetorically, on issues that are important to it. The best example is immigration. The Republican Party’s political agitation served up the issue on a silver platter to the Democrats. Their inability to capitalize on it among Latinos and other minority groups is truly mystifying.
The Republicans, on the other hand, never pursue a “centrist” political strategy and always follow a “base” strategy. This causes the Republican Party to adopt extreme rhetoric and policy positions while allowing it to maintain a degree of coherence in its positions, as it is constantly pointing out that it acts “out of principle.”
Although Republicans do not try to expand their base by compromising their “core” beliefs, they have tried to move the political center to the right. The conservative movement has constructed an effective network of think tanks, front groups, and media assets that have virtually unlimited resources. This “Right-Wing Message Machine” has been winning the war of ideas, despite the progression of political and social ideas over the last 100 years and social scientific evidence, all of which overwhelmingly favor progressive policies.
One example of the success of the conservative movement in moving the conventional wisdom to the right should suffice: public spending to stabilize the economy. Richard Nixon famously asserted early in his first term, “We are all Keynesians now.” This statement reflected not only his Administration’s embrace of Keynesian policy, but a consensus in both parties over modern macroeconomic theory. Nonetheless, 40 years later, conventional wisdom explicitly rejects the role of fiscal policy and, in particular, temporary government spending to make up for a collapse of private sector demand. This can only reflect the triumph of right wing ideology over all experience and reason.
In a third strategy, it is also possible that Democrats are specifically appealing not so much to the general public, but to the business and professional elites in this country. These elites have a remarkable degree of influence at all levels of American society — not only by influencing political decision makers, but by acting as decision makers themselves. Our government, particularly at the national level, consists of a revolving door between the business and public sectors. In effect, they form a class of permanent technocrats and are as close as it gets to a ruling class in the U.S. For this reason, to get anything done politically in the U.S. it is necessary to have their support.
This latter point represents a double-edged sword for the Democratic Party. On the one hand, these elites follow a simplified form of the policy approach seemingly favored by the Democratic Party. Moreover, they are fairly well informed about the context in which policy decision-making takes place. So, unlike the public, it would be possible to make a serious appeal on policy grounds to the elites. Also, to their credit, they are almost all liberal on social issues.
However, at this particular moment, an all-out appeal by the Democratic Party to the elites is treacherous both policy-wise and politically. They tend to be reasonably well informed about business, their professions, and the state of the country, but they are not particularly knowledgeable about specific policy issues. They can be easily misled about — or willingly distort — policy issues, particularly on subjects that are counter-intuitive.
Worse, they also exhibit serious policy biases — acting to protect their industries, professions, and permanent employers, and exhibiting biases reflecting the tension between private sector and collective action. The elites are devotees of the market and neo-liberalism. As a result, the elites have a general bias against government intervention in the market and policies designed to level the playing field or re-distribute wealth.
A good example of elite bias is their tendency to support “Free Trade.” Arguments in favor of free trade never take into account labor protections such as prohibitions against child labor; wage and hour standards; occupational safety and health protections; the right to organize; or prohibitions against work place discrimination. Nevertheless, free trade is an article of faith among the business and professional elites in the U.S. It is also an open secret that the private sector — in particular, the large multinational corporations headquartered or operating in the U.S. — has openly advocated free trade as a way to end-run government work place regulations, lower their labor costs, and increase their profitability.
Thomas Frank makes an important point in “What’s the Matter with Kansas.” In his book, Frank addresses the following seeming paradox: Why would average working people in Kansas — home of staunch early 20th century progressive political populism — vote against their economic interests and overwhelmingly support the Republican Party, the acknowledged party of Big Business that has systematically dismantled manufacturing and blue collar work in Kansas? Frank, a sociologist, found that on the key issue of jobs and overseas outsourcing, the Democrats were no better than the Republicans. Since there was no alternative on this issue, people in Kansas went with the Republicans, who they favored on some social issues. Frank’s conclusion — and his book — are a devastating indictment of the Democratic Party on this critical issue.
The irony is also too palpable not to note. Historically, the Democratic Party has been the party of labor and the working class and the Republican Party of business and the elites. But, as we have just seen, the Democratic Party now has tilted strongly toward the business and professional elites on a key issue of outsourcing (and many other issues) as its progressive populism has been hollowed out with the passage of time. Meanwhile, the emergence of conservative populism has been bought and paid for by Big Business to pave the way for the Republican Party to regain power, so as to avoid regulations favored by the Democrats and abhorred by the Republicans. The degree of political bad faith is astonishing. You just have to love politics in this country.
Cross-posted from New Deal 2.0.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Recently, our dog stopped breathing. His heart stopped pumping. I was there and I gave permission to a doctor to make this happen. Sable was just short of 15 (dog) years (105 people years) and he had suddenly and radically fallen ill. Faced with a choice to keep him alive in the hopes that he might miraculously get better or to release him from his mortal coil, I held him in my arms, cried and heaved as his soul freed himself from a beautiful, long life in his elegant, corporal form. My wife, Harriet, and I were at odds about this decision with me wanting to keep trying, but at the end we both agreed that we had to do what was right for Sable.
The night before Sable would die, I stayed up with him despite my own illness. I had decided that he should not be alone in his greatest time of need. He was scared. Neither he nor I slept that night. He did not dream due to overwhelming pain and I could not sleep due to devastating sorrow. A member of my wife’s family had recently died and my wife was still mourning that passing. As the night slid into its greatest depth, I thanked Sable over and over for being such a good friend. I held his paw, his head, kissed him and reassured him that he would be alright. In the middle of his shadow, he stopped panting, stopped hurting and looked directly into my eyes. He bathed in my soul to reassure me. I do not know what he was feeling. I would only be projecting my own emotion onto him and that would be a lie. But what I can tell you is that while looking into those powerful dark eyes, the night stood on its head, the house dared not breathe. Sable and I had crossed an infinite boundary into an eternal emerald field.
Then he returned to his suffering and me to my spiraling grief. Just a few weeks earlier Sable was a vibrant, old dog who assured us each day that we were his flock and nothing would harm us. He barked at every perceived and imagined threat, even if he physically was no longer able to track his prey. Sable was bred as a sheepdog – a Shetland collie. Sheepdogs are fearless and will take on all potential predators.
One day I was beside myself at not being able to keep an appointment with my daughter who I hadn’t seen in quite some time and who I missed. Life’s excesses had once again converged in my heart and I simply had to cancel our time together. Sable, who by then was having trouble standing, roused himself from the other room, took a giant step up to our kitchen where I was sitting, head in hands and merely stood beside me. Projection or not I knew that he had come to absorb my sorrow. He had done this for my wife and me many times and this was but the latest instance. He embodied compassion.
Night fled before light and an exceptionally warm, autumn day was born. Harriet awoke and came to where Sable and I were in our living room. She was shocked at what she saw. Sable looked awful, in dire pain, but as soon as she appeared, he wagged his tail and paid attention. I took him out into our backyard on the last 3 legs that still functioned, hardly able to bear his weight. Then he came back in, went directly to our bedroom to the place where he normally slept, laid down, closed his eyes and went to sleep. It was the first time in 24 hours that he was at peace. I delayed our trip to the Vet in the hopes that somehow this was a sign of recovery.
It wasn’t.
When I would take Sable to the dog run he would never join the barking, playful, chaotic pack. Instead, he walked with his silent, regal bearing amongst his flock ensuring they would not escape. Inevitably he would choose a much smaller dog, assuming it was a sheep and try to keep him or her in place. I didn’t have the heart to tell Sable that everyone was fenced in and that escape was not an option. My wife said that he looked like an elderly John Quincy Adams, statesman supreme, wandering the halls of Congress.
This story is not unique. Many families have had the heartbreaking task of putting their beloved pet to sleep to prevent further suffering. In Sable’s case he could no longer walk, he had stopped eating and could hardly drink. I don’t know much about dogs, but I do know that we humans are blessed to have them by our side. They fill our isolation with unconditional love, compassion and loyalty. They are our lesson. We are their slow students.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

The bloggers were right, it was about the jobs, jobs, jobs. For the first half of the year all the progressive bloggers were saying that the November election is going to turn out very, very badly for Democrats if they don’t focus on jobs. We said please, please drop this “austerity” nonsense, the only way to cut the deficit is to grow the economy. We were going kind of nuts about it, saying if you don’t spend money on jobs the voters will punish you.
But the administration and many in Congress were busy on an “austerity” fad. The “centrists” and the big-media pundits and the rest of the “serious people’ were saying we needed to do something about the deficits because “the markets” wanted them to.
So here we are. The bloggers were right (I include Paul Krugman among us), and the voters are punishing the politicians who listened to the same old DC elite pundits and campaign consultants and party insiders who demanded “austerity” cutbacks for We, the People.
For example, May 11, I wrote in It’s The JOBS, Stupid! Why DC Elites Don’t See This:
I concluded the May 26 post, Teacher Layoffs Loom Nationwide, DC Restaurants Humming, Jobs & Justice
June, The Real Deficit Is Jobs!
The real deficit is jobs. That is one more of those things that everyone can see in front of their faces, but we’re told it isn’t what it is.
. . . The excuse is that “the markets” will “lose confidence” in us. Apparently we aren’t working the salt mines hard enough. “The markets” — that’s the crowd who got in trouble and insisted that the world would end unless we immediately handed over to them all the rest of the money in the world — will “lose confidence” in our ability to work the mines hard enough, and will cut us off, unless we cut our pensions, sell off (to them) our resources, and promise never to be lazy and make demands for better wages, pensions, workplace safety, and do it now.
August’s Where Are The Jobs, Jobs, Jobs, Jobs, Jobs, Jobs? began:
The economy is stuck. We need jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs. Not tax cuts.
Why is it that often the progressives come to a consensus on an issue, while the DC elite, the campaign consultants, the big-media pundits and the “centrist” politicians come to their own different conclusion, and then later it turns out that the progressives were right not just on the policy but on the politics, and the DC-centrist-consultant-pundit class were wrong? This happens time after time after time on the things that matter.
Well, I have to say it: We told you so.
This post originally appeared at Campaign for America’s Future (CAF) at their Blog for OurFuture. I am a Fellow with CAF.

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Stills from “Inside the Haiti Earthquake”
Immediately after the earthquake in Haiti, I was a journalist with the goal of finding a story on a strict deadline but I was surprised at myself. I made choices so unlike me. I couldn’t meet my deadlines. I didn’t want to go into Port-au-Prince. I was overwhelmed. The story was the same everywhere — death and destruction.
When I attempted to assist as an aid worker, I was frustrated at my lack of ability to help directly. I distributed baby formula, only to find out the people I was trying to help mixed it with tainted water; babies were dying. Everywhere I turned I was confused; the UN and Peacekeepers seemed to be villains and journalists only interested in themselves.
But it was when I lost my children in a collapsed home, that the reality of the situation sunk in. Battling other Haitians at gates guarded by military personal, only to be told there was no work for me, no food to be had, made me realize my only choice was to help myself. This was the game changer.
I am playing the serious game — a first-person simulator created by Inside Disaster called, Inside the Haitian Earthquake. Be warned many of the images are brutal. The footage of dead bodies being scooped up by bulldozers was particularly haunting.
The strength of this interactive platform is the emotions it evokes. The choices often feel like a no win situation and text messages of an urgent nature redirected me throughout the “game” further clouding my goals.
For me the role of “the survivor” hit home as a sense of hopelessness and frustration left me doubting who to trust and where to turn. Lesson learned: Helping yourself is the hardest thing to do in a disaster situation.
I interviewed Katie McKenna of Inside Disaster about Inside the Haiti Earthquake
Where did the concept for an interactive experience of the earthquake in Haiti come from?
The role playing simulation is one part of the Inside Disaster multi-platform documentary project. Inside Disaster is a three-part documentary series about the Red Cross response in Haiti. From the footage and themes that emerged from our documentary and web footage from Haiti, we created an interactive website about Haiti and humanitarian work, and this first-person role-playing simulation.
The whole Inside Disaster project began when the documentary director and producer, Nadine Pequeneza, approached the international Red Cross with the idea of following their team through their next major disaster response operation. After they agreed, the documentary and web team were “on hold” for months while we waited for the next natural disaster to happen, and the Red Cross to be called in.
Even though at that time we didn’t know where the documentary would be filmed, we already created a loose framework for what we called the “interactive experience.” We knew that wherever the documentary team ended up, they would come back with incredible stories of survivors, aid workers, and inevitably, journalists. So we had our basic idea – that by experiencing a natural disaster through these three perspectives, the user would deepen their understanding of the conflicts, challenges and contradictions of disaster relief.
Because of this, we had a loose plan in place even before we knew that our focus would be in Haiti.
Would you call this a “game” or “role playing?”
We call it an “interactive experience” or a “role-playing simulation.” It’s emphatically not a game, first because there are no points, and no “winning” or “losing” in the stories we’ve created; there are only decisions and consequences. Our goal was to approximate how people learn in real life. The second reason we don’t call this a game is that although the stories are based on a written script, the footage is documentary material from the first days after the earthquake in Haiti, of real people going through real experiences. It’s certainly not a game for them, and we want the user to understand that too.
Are there other such interactive experiences out there that this was modeled upon?
Inside the Haiti Earthquake falls at the intersection between the worlds of “serious gaming,” which uses games to expose users to new perspectives in complex or controversial issues, and the emerging space of interactive and web documentaries. We looked at the fantastic French web documentary, Journey to the End of Coal, before we started, and it convinced us that we would be able to do what we set out to do — create a rich, full-screen online experience filled with video and music that would be accessible to anyone with a high-speed web connection and an up-to-date version of Flash.
How is the Red Cross involved in the project?
The Red Cross gave the documentary team permission to follow them through the Haiti response, but they were not directly involved in the Inside the Haiti Earthquake simulation. We were very happy that they’ve written the piece up on their Red Cross Talks blog, and have been supportive of the project since it launched.
I thought it was very interesting how the different “roles” had unique experiences and even different emotional impacts. What was the research process in creating this experience?
The complex, intersecting storylines were crafted by the project’s writer and co-director, Michael Gibson, an award-winning “serious gaming” expert with a lot of experience creating first-person web-based learning simulations.
To do the research, he spent hours and hours talking to two people. First, the documentary’s director, Nadine Pequeneza, about what she saw and experienced while filming the Red Cross, the thousands and thousands of “maverick aid workers” who showed up in Haiti on their own after the quake, and survivors like Marcel, Magalie, and Louken through the month after the quake, and on two return trips after that. The second essential resource was Nicolas Jolliet, the co-director, editor, and composer of Inside the Haiti Earthquake.
Nico travelled to Haiti with the crew as our Web Producer and Field Director; his mission was to go into the camps and find out how people who hadn’t received any humanitarian aid were surviving. Because he’s young, speaks Creole, and was traveling with two incredibly talented and cool Haitian http://www.wisegeek.com/in-journalism-what-is-a-fixer.htm, he got to go places where other media didn’t, and film things – like the amazing local music you hear throughout the simulation – that were quite unique.
Nadine and Nico shared the stories they had experienced with Michael, the things they had found surprising or frustrating, and which of those had been captured on camera, and those became the basis of the script.
From the script, Nico began to create and edit the sequences of photos, video and music that make up Inside the Haiti Earthquake. And when, in August, we realized that we needed some footage that we were missing, he went back to Haiti to film some more. During that time, he also worked with local musicians to craft the musical score, and hired a very talented local English teacher, Falaune Louis Jacques, to record the narration for the survivor story.
Who is the intended audience and what are the results you are hoping to achieve from people participating in this “game?”
One of the amazing, and in some ways inspiring things about natural disasters is the degree to which people in other countries want to get involved and help out. We want to deepen people’s understanding — as donors, media consumers, and sometimes “maverick” aid workers who show up on their own — of the complexity and difficulties of relief work in disaster situations.
This project is for anyone who’s even given money to an aid organization and wanted to know why things aren’t changing on the ground fast enough. It’s for people who show up to help in natural disasters without training, resources, or being able to speak the local language, and can sometimes do more harm than good without intending to. It’s to help people realize the complex, and sometimes contradictory roles played by the media in these situations — that their work is essential in getting the story out, but short deadlines and shallow reporting can sometimes reinforce unhelpful stereotypes and oversimplifications of the situation. For example, we wanted to show that the Haitian people are survivors and active agents in their own recovery, not helpless victims waiting for aid workers to arrive. And that was the reality on the ground for the vast majority of Haitians after the quake.
Do you as the creators feel there are right answers or choices? I found myself often conflicted, which I think is probably a realistic emotion in crisis.
There are no right or wrong answers, just decisions and consequences. Michael Gibson deliberately created a script that uses the assumptions that many people have about aid workers, survivors and journalists in natural disasters, to surprise the user and subvert their expectations. We wanted people to learn the same way they do in real life — through experience, making mistakes and experiencing the consequences.
Inside the Haiti Earthquake can found here.
To learn more about Inside Disaster please visit their website – www.insidedisaster.com

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

While U.S. voters head to the polls today – and everyone from Fox to Politico to your uncle on Facebook becomes a pundit trying to predict the results – the outcome is already crystal clear: polluters have won again, handily.With the advent of now limitless corporate donations polluting the democratic process thanks to the Supreme Court’s insane ruling on Citizens United, dirty energy interests, Wall Street fat cats and lobbyists will run America for the foreseeable future. Corporations have long enjoyed the advantage of spending a tiny amount (compared to their enormous profits) to influence the entire political system, buying future access and favors that pay off for years to come, simply by driving contributions to their favored candidates in every contest from local zoning board races to governors to U.S. Senators. But thanks to Citizens United, corporate influence is now far more invasive and impactful. Polluters can freely run attack ads and vicious smear campaigns against climate hawks, deploy their front groups to mislead voters on everything from health care to global warming, sponsor ballot initiatives to kill clean energy progress, and generally play fast and dirty with zero accountability for their actions. The result: the tragic collapse of American democracy, in the words of my friend and former boss Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (For a bit of solace this election day, check out David Robert’s excellent interview with Bobby at Grist detailing why all is not yet lost in the war against carbon cronyism.)
I’ll conceed readily that Citizens United isn’t the only problem threatening U.S. democracy. There’s also the matter of participation, or lack thereof, among the public. It doesn’t help matters that less than half of eligible voters in the U.S. typically cast a ballot in midterm elections. So at least make sure all your friends and family get to the polls today – and encourage them to remain active in holding their leaders accountable. Elections are just step one in the process.Putting on my own pundit hat for a minute – hey, everyone’s doing it – I predict voters wil beat down outrageously obvious polluter-funded initiatives like California’s oily Prop 23 and Prop 26, and ignore the insanely loud shouting of Christine O’Donnell supporters to deny her a seat in Congress – perhaps chiefly for the fact that she has zero experience or qualifications to be there, but also because of her stupefying denial of science and reason. But let there be no doubt about it. A lot of the anti-science candidates – whose antics on the campaign trail have made for humorous, if horrifying, spectacle – are about to become anti-science lawmakers with a vote in Congress. That spells disaster for climate and energy policy, and all other legislative efforts that rely on a respect for facts and a willingness to negotiate. The anti-science caucus is coming to a Congress near you, and we have polluters and wealthy corporate fat cats largely to thank for it.

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

This is the fourth piece of a weekly series in which the Progressive Jewish Alliance looks at the propositions on this year’s California ballot in light of the weekly Torah portion.
After the stone-throwing media ads from Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman this election season, you would think the two California gubernatorial candidates were constitutionally incapable of agreeing on a single issue. Not so! As part of a larger “tough on crime” stance, Whitman has proclaimed she’s “firmly against Proposition 19.” More colorfully, Brown has declared, “We got to compete with China. If everybody’s stoned, how the hell are we going to make it?”
Meg and Jerry may agree on this one, but Proposition 19 has been an intense source of debate among progressives and policy wonks alike.
Fortunately for us, grappling with complexity and nuance are hallmarks of Jewish religious text and tradition. Evidence of Judaism’s love of debate can be found in any page of Talmud, replete with rabbinical volleys across the generations, or in this week’s Torah portion (parshah), which celebrates the delightfully imperfect Abraham and Sarah.
Proposition 19 proponents claim the initiative will, “Put police priorities where they belong,” and, “Generate billions of dollars in [state tax] revenues.” They argue legalization will save $1 billion annually from reduced arrest, prosecution and incarceration of drug users and will reduce cross-border narcotics trafficking controlled by Mexican cartels. Proposition 19 continues prohibition of and penalties for driving under the influence. Proposition 19 also preserves criminal justice system referrals to drug treatment programs for certain individuals.
Perhaps the most powerful arguments in favor of Proposition 19 are made by those studying the disparate impact that criminalization has historically had on communities of color. The Drug Policy Alliance reports: This pattern is repeated across California:
County
Arrest Rate
% Population (Black)
Riverside
265% higher
6.6%
San Bernadino
255% higher
9.5%
San Diego
365% higher
5.6%
Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee has used the term “scarlet letter” to describe the stigmatizing effects of a drug possession record. Even if you can pay the $450 plus in fines and court costs for a possession charge, the recorded misdemeanor “drug crime” follows you like a plague, inhibiting your ability to rent an apartment, enter college, get a student loan or find a job. Governor Schwarznegger recently signed sentencing reforms into law, but it is too soon to tell what impact they will have.
Judaism abhors the idea that a person could be stigmatized for life. Rather, great value is assigned to the practice of repentance or tshuvah, translated literally as, “Returning from evil” (Mishneh Torah, Laws of Repentance, 2:2-5). Jewish law also suggests that public policy reflect the Biblical notion that neither the community nor any individual should cause another to sin. This concept is based on Leviticus 19:14 (“and you shall not place a stumbling block before the blind”), understood by the Rabbis and codified by Maimonides as the principle of not making one’s fellow a criminal (Mishneh Torah, Laws of Murder and the Preservation of Life, 13:14).
The opponents of Proposition 19 make their own set of powerful arguments. For starters, they claim Attorney General Eric Holder’s commitment to enforce the Controlled Substances Act even if Proposition 19 passes means that California could become embroiled in costly legal battles and lose billions of dollars designated for states that follow federal “drug free” requirements. And the Rand Corporation has issued a set of studies that question whether legalization would have any meaningful impact on Mexican drug cartels and whether legalization actually provides budget relief, given the unforeseen public health impacts that could result from increased usage.
The San Diego Union-Tribune pointed out that Proposition 19′s imprecise drafting could create an unmanageable patchwork of local regulations and taxes:
In the end, Proposition 19′s imperfections are endemic of the ballot initiative process itself, which is ripe for critique and even an overhaul. Perhaps that is why pairing a proposition with each week’s Torah portion has felt so apt to us. In politics and religion, our best and highest calling may be to engage in the spirit of intellectual debate — to test, question, study, argue and sometimes resolve the complexities of our time.
The Progressive Jewish Alliance has wrestled with the issues and we’ve taken strong positions. We’ve examined and discussed and decided:
Yes on Proposition 19
No on Proposition 23
Yes on Proposition 24
Yes on Proposition 25/No on Proposition 26
We hope our arguments have been compelling. But when you enter that voting booth this Tuesday, it will be up to you. Until then, California, get inspired, get informed and get to the polls. Happy voting!
Elissa Barrett is the Executive Director of the Progressive Jewish Alliance.
PJA’s full voting recommendations on all the California propositions are available online.

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

In the end, politics is a matter of focus. As Ronald Reagan said: “There is no substitute for repetition.” Even Jerry Brown, who notoriously hates repeating himself, finds new ways to say the same things.
But not, at least so far and unfortunately for him, President Barack Obama.
Obama got a major economic stimulus bill passed and took other steps, but did not sustain his public focus on the economy. For nearly a year, we heard that Obama was at last about to pivot back to the economy. This said, ironically, in the midst of a slow recovery from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.
President Barack Obama, speaking at the Millennium Development Goals Summit at the annual United Nations General Assembly meeting this past September in New York, never really pivoted back to the economy after taking steps last year.
If ever “It’s the economy, stupid” was a true truism, it’s been since 2008 in American politics.
But precious time, energy, and capital, i.e., focus has constantly been allocated elsewhere. Not the least of it on a health care bill that took far too long to pass, allowing a firestorm to be kindled that still hasn’t burned out.
Obama has pursued a wide bandwidth presidency in a narrow bandwidth, and quite shallow, media culture. But it’s too easy to imagine that his problems — and he can certainly recover and win re-election, incidentally, especially looking at that collection of Republican candidates — is simply due to our dysfunctional and toxic media culture.
Now, I find all the things other than the economy that Obama has focused his attentions upon to be quite fascinating. Every day on my New West Notes blog, I lay out what he’s doing (that we know of) along with some thoughts of what it might mean.
But whatever he’s doing in geopolitics — and Obama is certainly giving that Columbia IR degree of his a very extensive workout — doesn’t matter very much to voters. Even though most of it, with the notable exception of the Afghanistan adventure, is sensible and perhaps even visionary.
A great politician, and Obama can and should be a great politician, adapts to changing circumstances.
Just over a year ago, I took some heat when I wrote that Obama did not deserve the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet.
That was a very different time, so different that Obama figured prominently in a key subplot of the annual Doctor Who Christmas special, giving a speech to announce a solution to the global economic crisis.
No one’s going to be conjuring that sort of fantasy this Christmas.
The seemingly endless process around the passage of the national health care reform bill grabbed focus from the economy and left Obama scrambling in September to try to reintroduce the positive effects of the legislation.
In an historical irony, this election takes place 50 years after the election of President John F. Kennedy. And a few days after the death of Ted Sorensen, Kennedy’s intellectual alter ego, counselor, and speechwriter, whom I got to know when he served as national co-chair of Senator Gary Hart’s presidential campaigns.
Sorensen gave Obama a critical early endorsement, and quite evidently loved the younger man’s felicitous and frequently muscular use of the English language.
But it’s hard to imagine that Sorensen, much less Kennedy, would fail to adjust to changing circumstances.
With the absence of public focus from this very gifted communicator in the White House, corrosive myths have taken hold.
For one, that the massive deficits are principally the result of increased government spending. Rather than the reality, which is that they are the largely the result of the collapse in tax receipts brought on by the recession.
That’s clear enough to anyone who looks at state budgets in this era. In California, for example, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has cut spending sharply, yet deficits are high. (Though a very tiny fraction of the state’s massive gross domestic product.) Why? Revenues are down.
Do most voters understand this with regard to Obama’s federal budget? Probably not. And in the absence of presidential focus, in the midst of a shallow, ADD media culture, phony rhetoric carries the day.
“What we’ve got here is, failure to communicate.”
In fact, a recent Bloomberg poll shows that most voters, and Americans in general, simply don’t know key framing facts about the economy.
In fact, what they think they know is wrong.
Two-thirds of likely voters believe that the U.S. economy has contracted, that taxes have gone up, and the money lent to the banks in the controversial Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) can never been recovered.
In reality, the U.S. economy, after nearly falling off a cliff to the bottom of a very deep pit at the tail end of the Bush/Cheney Administration, has been growing for the last four quarters in a row.
But only 33% of likely voters know that. A whopping 61% think that the economy has shrunk.
Taxes, rather than going up, have been cut for the middle class by Obama.
Obama belatedly tried to make the case that he has delivered on his campaign promises in a September speech to the Congressional Black Caucus dinner in Washington.
And banks are paying back their TARP funds.
Obama has cut taxes by $240 billion. Most of that, and it was mostly for the middle class, was in the much maligned stimulus bill.
But likely voters don’t get it. In fact, 52% think that federal income taxes increased for the middle class over the past two years, with only 19% disagreeing.
Tellingly, 50% of independent voters, in many ways the key to Obama’s sweeping 2008 election victory over John McCain, believe this canard.
It may be that people will never feel good about the economy until the unemployment figure comes down, sharply.
It may be that Obama should have done things very differently in terms of policy.
It may be that Obama doesn’t have enough of a warm and fuzzy side, or hasn’t the ability to project enough of a Clintonesque “I feel your pain” performance, to win people over.
But when you command the bully pulpit of the presidency, and your own supporters don’t know the facts about what you’ve done on the central issue of the era, that is a very serious problem.
You can check things during the day on my site, New West Notes … www.newwestnotes.com.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com