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“In any case, the large government intervention is prima facie evidence that by this time the public had lost confidence in the self-correcting powers of the financial structure.”
Ben Bernanke, “Essays On The Great Depression” (Princeton University Press, 2000)
Yes, saving the global financial system from chaos was hugely expensive. The price was 23.5% of the nation’s annual economic output, spread about domestic and foreign financial giants as well as iconic corporate empires requiring assistance to continue operating on a day-to-day basis. Sure, you should be shaken to annoying rage that it required suing the government to find out where this fortune in taxpayer money ended up.
Below is the link to full story.

http://search.forbes.com/search/find?tab=searchtabgeneraldark&MT=streettalk%2C+bernanke%2C++%243.3+trillion%2C+econoic+equivalent+of+war

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

WikiLeaks’ self-acclaimed leader, Julian Assange is the new rebel with a cause, and a computer. In fact, he might be a geek gone wild, a techno-hero hacker, or just the smartest, damn businessman we’ve ever encountered. You know, he could have been the next Mark Zuckerberg. Yes, think about it. WikiLeaks gets to decide what and who stands naked before the world. Facebook pushes the boundaries of what is private and what is public. Perhaps this is just two sides of the same coin. Both have lived outside the box, are hackers of a sort, and have surrounded themselves with wickedly smart cyber wizards. But one creates an industry, better known as Facebook, and the other is on the path to being charged for treason. Maybe it was the likes of business maven, Sheryl Sandberg that kept Mr. Facebook from falling overboard into complete hacker land. Or maybe it was something intrinsically different about Mark Zuckerberg, and his own moral compass. After all, he did use Harvard as his staging ground, not the Pentagon.
All of which begs further musing about the hacker culture, dear Julian, and his merry band of malcontents. They sure have managed to jump onto a very different kind of world stage of their making. Indeed it’s been a long and arduous journey for these folks from the deep, dark outlaw weblogs of San Francisco’s hacker community to traveling the world. Maybe it’s the fame and spotlight that they wanted all along. Admittedly, Mark Zuckerberg is now rich and famous at an ever so young age, and dear Julian had been forced to keep trolling for fame, and certainly fortune for at least an extra decade or two. And yes, hacking is a kind of world that thrives by living on the edge in the pursuit of truth, good and brilliance. It has its own rules, and ways of doing things. Still both men are embroiled in the debate over privacy and security. But one works out his stuff from inside the game, and the other from way outside. Yet Andy Greenberg of Forbes brilliantly recognizes Assange, as a “prophet of a coming age of involuntary transparency, the leader of an organization devoted to divulging the world’s secrets using technology unimagined a generation ago.” Maybe this is the new definition of a hacker hero that does things for the grander good, but without regard for collateral damage. One still has to ask the question about Julian Assange and his internal compass. He just seems to having too good a time in front of the television cameras for comfort which begs the money trail question. When the curtain is pulled back, who will be standing there? Will it be China, Iran or maybe even North Korea? Who would appeal to the anarchist manifesto or the hacker creed? That’s just one more fascinating question that has been left on the table as everybody is talking trash about WikiLeaks and Julian Assange.
Please note the extensive Pearltree used for the references on this and past articles commenting on WikiLeaks.
Wiki Leaks

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

In May 2006 Jay-Z was angry. The Economist had just published an article with the suggestive title ‘Bubbles and bling’ in which Frdric Rouzaud, managing director of Louis Roederer (the French producer that makes the champagne Cristal) openly admitted that the association of Cristal with the “bling lifestyle” left him largely unimpressed. Asked to comment on whether the trend was hurting the image of his luxurious product he had this to say: “That’s a good question, but what can we do? We can’t forbid people from buying it”.
Jay-Z felt aggrieved. And four years later, even though he seems to have simmered down a bit, he is still not letting go. In his book Decoded, (published this November by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House), which is, in his own words, ‘not an autobiography’, he is revisiting the events.
Jay-Z still considers these comments an uncalled for attack on hip-hop culture. Back in 2006 he retaliated with the following statement: “I view his comments as racist and will no longer support any of his products through any of my various brands, including the 40/40 Club, nor in my personal life”. The boycott was covered by mainstream New York media, and this attested to the influence of the materialistic school of hip-hop — championed by Jay-Z, Notorious BIG, and others — as it had made it into the cultural mainstream. Shawn Carter himself was considered at the time as an important tastemaker, “the E.F. Hutton of hip hop”, as the New York Times had put it in an article published in June 2006. As president of Def Jam and with his personal worth at approximately $286 million, he was well aware of his power.
In his 2010 account of the events Jay-Z offers a more sober and thoughtful commentary. “We used their brand as a sign of luxury and they got free advertising and credibility every time we mentioned it … Cristal, before hip-hop had a nice story attached to it; it was a quality, premium, luxury brand known to connoisseurs. But hip-hop gave it a deeper meaning. Suddenly, Cristal didn’t just signify the good life, but the good life laced with hip-hop’s values: subversive, self-made, audacious, even a little dangerous”. In real life, this exchange was never reciprocal. This is not how these things work.
How these things actually work has been investigated and evidenced by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu was an intellectual star, ever since the 1970s, in French and international academia. His 1979 book, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, has been extremely influential in the field of sociology, and his analysis so accessible and useful that it has earned him an audience beyond academic circles (and a posthumous Twitter account). Bourdieu proved that taste, the same taste that makes a champagne sell for $600 a bottle, or aesthetics, and the choices that we make in art, literature, and music are not innocent. They are in fact, together with the cultural symbols that we appropriate, weapons used in class competition.
His primary aim was to debunk the illusion the dominant classes have of themselves that they are somehow more deserving of their privileges in power and wealth, because of their superior knowledge and culture. He also exposed the role of the educational system, and in particular that of the elite Universities’ and (French) Grandes Ecoles, in securing the generational succession of higher class dominance.
Bourdieu viewed social space as a field where different classes compete with each other in a game whose outcome is determined by the volumes of economic, social, and cultural capital each player accumulates and by the relative weighting of these capitals in relation to overall capital holdings. Cultural capital refers to the knowledge and skills that we acquire through family and schooling and is considered an asset, such as real estate or money. There are mechanisms that transform cultural capital to economic and vice versa and it precisely these that Jay-Z has managed to manipulate with such success, aided by his instincts and “training” as a hustler. As he puts its, “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man”.
Before Jay-Z became a business he had first to transform himself into a businessman. He did it by converting cultural capital into social and economic capital. Originating from a working class background, he generated cultural capital by putting mid 1990s hip hop into the best selling music mainstream. Doing that he was able to convert cultural capital into economic, and this found its way back to his lyrics, which were heavily embellished by nods to luxury products.
Simultaneously because of his cultural influence he was able to develop the social connections that would enable him to become a music mogul, an entrepreneur and a corporate executive. Media like the New York Times and New York magazine were happy to document his ascension. Shawn Carter is a self made man, a winner in the game of social mobility and it is such stories that make great copy. He was only happy to contribute to this; hip hop culture makes it legitimate to literally sing your own praises.
When hip hop became a bona fide mainstream cultural item it created dozens of new millionaires; rappers and producers who in their lyrics bragged about the symbols of higher social status they possessed, while simultaneously proclaiming themselves to be in touch with their working class roots. When rappers were ordering Cristal they were actually buying social status, a luxury with a European aristocratic pedigree, and the symbol of a higher class with an already developed semantic network. They were declaring their need for a higher cultural status that would match their large holdings in economic capital.
Cristal prides itself as a champagne originally made in 1876 for Czar Alexander II. It is the definition of a Veblen good, its price rises according to demand, therefore it has to be rare, inaccessible, expensive, elitist; hoi polloi cannot drink it. Therefore Cristal has no interest in being associated with an anti-culture, a subversive culture as Jay Z puts it, or even a formerly radical one. Cristal wants to maintain the status quo. The Economist does not carry the same cultural connotations as Cristal, although their target audiences can intersect. After all they sell half their circulation in North America. They are a liberal, center-right magazine dealing with economics and politics, widely perceived as the thinking man’s Time, and one of the few periodical publications that has seen no decline in its sales. Most of its readers are managers and professionals, what Bourdieu calls the dominated fraction of the dominant class, who read the magazine as means of acquiring canonized cultural capital. Cultural capital is canonized through academia and although The Economist is by no means an academic journal, the magazine’s subject matter and quality guarantee its readers this association with high brow intellectuality.
As Bourdieu noted the connections between cultural capital and class are less important for the dominant classes. They can transfer economic capital through inheritance and gain social capital through privileged social connections. As symbols The Economist simply did not need Jay-Z, nor did Cristal.
Vaios Papanagnou is the editor in chief of Esquire Greece

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

O! say can you see by the dawn's early light, What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming, Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight, O'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming? And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air, Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there; O! say does that star-spangled banner yet wave, O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
It is the only first edition of the poem in private hands, and one of just 11 such manuscripts to exist, Christie's New York auction house said.
Francis Scott Key wrote a first draft of the poem in September 1814.
He was inspired after witnessing the defence of Baltimore's Fort McHenry against a British bombardment.
The poem was later set to music and was finally adopted as the US national anthem in 1931.
Christie's manuscript expert Chris Coover said that since the poem's publication it had “become in the intervening years an absolute true icon of American history and patriotism”.
Mr Coover said of the manuscript: “I'm fortunate enough to have been here 30 years. It's the first time I've ever handled one and it's quite a thrill.”
The defence of the against the British navy occurred during the Battle of Baltimore on 13-14 September, 1814.
After 25 hours of continuous bombing, the British decided to leave since they were unable to destroy the fort as they had hoped.

Source:BBC

Voters in the midterm elections sent a clear directive to Congress to tackle unemployment, and Democrats and Republicans fervently reaffirmed their commitment to get Americans back to work. But the last three weeks have made it clear that years of disappointing jobs reports, anger from unemployed Americans, pressure from desperate businesses, and warnings from economists of all stripes are little match for the political realities in Washington. Partisan sniping and a focus on deficit reduction mean that any new proposal to jumpstart hiring will be subject to heavy scrutiny. Members of Congress will likely shy away from offering large-scale, comprehensive plans to create jobs for fear of being portrayed as fiscally irresponsible.
Even if no one in Washington is willing to go big for American workers, lawmakers must still take steps to advance job creation incrementally–or risk losing their jobs in 2012. A good starting point to stimulate job creation is to find out where it’s actually happening. In which states? In which industries? How can we build on this momentum?
It turns out that during the height of the recession, Latinos made employment gains in several states (see table here). This is despite elevated unemployment rates for Latinos, which remain two to three percentage points above the national rate. These figures only account for Latinos who are currently employed, so they cannot be explained solely by the fact that Latinos are the fastest-growing share of the American labor force (those who are employed and those who are searching for work). Against the odds, Latino workers are helping to sustain a fragile but unmistakable recovery.
In the coming months, the National Council of La Raza (NCLR)–the largest national Latino civil rights and advocacy organization in the United States–will take a closer look at promising employment trends. We’ll interview industry and state labor market experts and make recommendations based on what we learn. We welcome your input and hope you will contribute in the comments section below.

Follow Eric Rodriguez on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/NCLR

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Gay marriage is bad for America.
I mean it; I think gay marriage is a terrible idea, and I want nothing to do with it.
Evan Wolfson, founder and director of the marriage-equality organization Freedom to Marry, argues that the term “gay marriage” suggests we’re asking for special privileges — privileges that straight married people don’t have. Me, I take the opposite view. As I see it, any adjectival or nominal qualification can only limit the idea of marriage, can only make it less than just plain marriage and all it encompasses. A menu is a menu, but a kids menu is a very particular kind of menu, sharing some but not all of the qualities of other menus. Soup can be refreshing in any clime on any day of the year; chicken soup can’t. “Marriage” is marriage, and offers a host of possibilities. “Gay marriage,” I think, offers fewer.
If we need a noun, I suggest “marriage equality.”
If you had told me on May 4, 1993, that in a decade and a half I would be desperately researching waiting periods for marriage licenses in Connecticut and Massachusetts because otherwise my boyfriend was going to drag me to his home state of Iowa to get married (“But corn is fun!”), I would have laughed in your face. Then, if you are a boy, I would most likely have asked you out, since that’s what I spent most of my sophomore year of college doing, and you would have said no, since that’s what the boys I asked out spent most of my sophomore year of college doing, and I would have gone back to my dorm room to cry.
But the next day, the Hawai’i Supreme Court ruled that denying same-sex couples the right to marry probably violated the state constitution, and everything changed. I mean, the boys I asked out still said no, but the possibilities of what they were saying no to had been cracked wide open, so I cried much, much harder.
Seventeen years later (though, extraordinarily, I seem to have aged only five), I have at last found a boy I was able to trick into proposing to me. After getting engaged two and a half years ago, we’ve made a few attempts at planning a wedding, but none of them have come to fruition, mostly because the damn rules keep changing. “Honey, let’s go to Massachusetts and get married! Oh, wait, now we can only get married in Massachusetts if we live there. Okay, well, let’s go to California and get marri- whoops, we weren’t fast enough. Never mind California. Wait, maybe we can still go to California! Nope. Um… oh, crap.”
Since May 17, 2004, when a Cambridge city clerk pronounced Tanya McCloskey and Marcia Kadish married under the laws of Massachusetts, same-sex couples have followed their lead in the United States — over 150,000 all told in Massachusetts, California, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont, Iowa, Washington, D.C., and the Coquille Indian Tribe (within the boundaries of Oregon).
And that’s the thing: McCloskey and Kadish, and the multitude of other married same-sex couples — theirs wasn’t a gay marriage. It was a marriage.
When Roman soldiers, forbidden in the first and second centuries A.D. to take wives, were finally allowed to wed, they weren’t military marrying; they were marrying.
When former slaves freed by the Emancipation Proclamation stood before clergymen and spoke their vows, they weren’t getting black married or freedmen married; they were getting married.
When Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter said “I do” — they were the interracial couple whose victory in the Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia made it illegal in America to prevent mixed-race couples from wedding — they didn’t get interracial married; they got married.
Same-sex couples today are in no different position. I don’t want to get gay married.
I want to get married.
Joel Derfner, a composer and the author of Gay Haiku and Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever and What Happened Instead, appears with his best friend Sarah Rose on the upcoming Sundance Channel show Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys. Follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/joelderfner, keep up with the show at http://sarahandjoellikeboys.com, and learn more about Joel, his books, and his music at http://joelderfner.com.

This Blogger’s Books from
Gay Haiku
by Joel Derfner
Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever and What Ended Up Happening Instead
by Joel Derfner

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf is her signature work, but don’t box Ntozake Shange into a corner. At 62, the fiery poet and playwright continues to wield her feminist sword of truth for generations of readers who have grown to love the Brooklyn author. Her poetry is a living breathing thing — ever evolving like a mist in the canyons of our minds.
Die-hard fans of For Colored Girls may have gasped when word leaked that director Tyler Perry — whose wild caricature of Madea has earned him both accolades and scorn — planned to translate Shange’s most celebrated work into a major motion picture. Admittedly, I was among those very nervous about this project. For Colored Girls is nothing to be toyed with; I consider it sacred poetry — an homage to so many African-American girls and women who find themselves suffocating through life’s storms to the point where suicide seems like a sweet relief.
As a television journalist, I frequently reflect upon Shange’s epic work when I report stories like 30-year-old Leisa Jones from Staten Island. On July 22, 2010, police in New York City ruled that she slit the throats of her 14-year-old son, CJ, as well as her 10-year-old daughter, Brittany, and 7-year-old Melonie. After that horrific act, she set her apartment ablaze at 302 Nicholas Avenue on Staten Island — and her toddler son, Jermaine, died of smoke inhalation. Leisa Jones saw murder/suicide as a viable option not only for herself, but for her four precious children. This is in large part what Ntozake Shange was talking about in her groundbreaking work. Shange foresaw the “Leisa Jones” of the world more than thirty years ago, which is why so many of us consider the author’s work a sort of Holy Grail.
He has a lot of critics, but Tyler Perry maintained the integrity of Shange’s poetry and her powerful underlying message. When the movie ended, I was a bit despondent — bordering on tears. That’s exactly how I felt the first time I read For Colored Girls. Tyler Perry’s film drives Shange’s message home… now if we can just help girls and women like Leisa Jones find the elusive rainbow before it’s too late.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

The Cancun UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the gathering to replace the Kyoto Protocol, just began in Mexico. Not only is no one from the U.S. Congress bothering to fly the 1354 miles from DC, no member is even sending a staffperson to observe. Of course, neither Barack Obama nor Hu Jintao, the leaders of the two countries emitting the most carbon dioxide (42%), will be there. But, there will be 15,000 participants. Why bother?
A bigger waste of time and money I can’t imagine. Next to most of the Department of Defense budget, of course. At least hold these meetings in the middle of summer, say, in Delhi, to see people sweating. But Copenhagen last year and Cancun this year, in December? Makes no sense.
What are some of the numbers? In the benchmark year, 1990, China and India produced 13% of the world carbon dioxide emissions. In 2007, their total doubled to 26%, and in 2035, the expectation is up to 37%. Thus far, both India and China have been exempted and, further, are not included in any future agreement. The U.S. signed — but the U.S. Congress never ratified — the Kyoto Protocol, which will expire in 2012. But who really cares, as this treaty was totally ineffectual anyway, for global carbon dioxide emissions increased 41% between 1990 and 2008? And can you believe that one hundred and ninety one countries signed and ratified the treaty?
The USA is the only major industrial national not to have ratified the Kyoto Protocol. Is something wrong with us? Mind you, China, India and Russia actually said yes, we will join the world.
In 2009, an American poll showed that more people were opposed than not to the climate change bill passed by the House of Representatives (41% to 37%). A newer survey this year showed that we are even less concerned about global warming. Now with the Republicans in control of the House complementing Senate Democrats from fossil states, the situation becomes totally impossible.
All this even though NASA has reported that:
Furthermore, just two weeks ago, the International Energy Agency predicted that the temperature of our atmosphere would increase by 6.3 degrees F by 2035, only 25 years from now.
I once thought any year now, a really hot summer would kill many, many millions and decision-makers would finally do something. A few months ago I came to a conclusion that there is no early chance that the world will get so hot as to be calamitous. Thus, I am afraid, observing the politics of America, that there will not ever be a global agreement to check climate heating… until it is too late! As Pogo said: We have met the enemy and he is US.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

As we approach the end of another year marked by collective angst over the economy, one bit of news has reminded us yet again how much clout emotion wields in the marketplace. Across the Atlantic, all it took to funnel a potential $1 billion into the British pipeline was a single woman and a single word:
“Yes.”
As soon as Catherine Middleton accepted the proposal of Prince William and placed his late mother’s stunning sapphire engagement ring on her finger, retailers, vendors, bankers, politicians and tourism officials started talking windfall instead of downfall.
The prospect of a royal wedding and a young princess who fancies feathers in her hair instantly pushed aside the gray clouds that have stubbornly hung over our British friends much the same way they have here. Souvenir Kate and William mugs flew onto dime store shelves practically overnight, while department stores rushed to get knock-offs of Kate’s blue engagement dress onto their sales racks, and London hotels fantasized about packing in the tourists. The media also wins, not only through the number of eyeballs drawn to TV news coverage and blogs about the festivities, but through the fat special magazine editions (both online and print), quickie books and eventual movies-of-the-week, as well.
Inevitably, that giddy first response is now being tempered by grumbling in the business sector, which warns that the national holiday marking the union could actually end up costing five times what the April 29 wedding is expected to rake in, should too many workers decide to play hooky and extend their celebrations. Such bubble-bursting hardly matters, though.
Because the real symptom of recovery – both here and abroad – isn’t the money. It’s the mood.
We don’t need algorithms or analysts to figure out that all the world loves a spectacle, and when it comes to happy spectacles, few can top a royal wedding. An estimated 1 billion people followed the July 29, 1981 wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer on television or radio. Now their son’s nuptials will become the first social media royal wedding, which promises an even greater worldwide audience. For consumers, it also promises instant gratification: When the bride-to-be has her picture snapped on the street wearing her latest whimsical feather ‘fascinator,’ legions of copy-Kates will start Tweeting about it or launch a search on their smart-phones to place an online order for one of their own. This time, we’re all engaged.
It’s all enough to give us a bad bout of royal envy.
Seriously, the power of a little old-fashioned fairy tale to boost the national morale is something we could use here in the colonies. What have we got to work with? Anything? The Obama daughters are too young to marry off in glass coaches down Pennsylvania Avenue, and the alternative of junior high sock-hops in the State Dining Room just doesn’t fill this particular void. Since Bristol Palin didn’t win Dancing With the Stars, drop 30 pounds, turn Democrat, move in with Justin Timberlake and start a fashion line, what fantasies do we have left? Anyone?
You’ll have to forgive us if we sound a little desperate. You have to understand that these days, everyone in our industry is obsessed with behavioral targeting, metrics and micro-targeting (with digital, there are now a zillion ways to measure who is seeing your ad, how long they are spending with it, what they do after they see it, the impact of customized message delivery, etc., etc., etc.) Sometimes, we have to confess, we feel woozy from all the data we’ve ingested like too much technological tryptophan. It just feels like we’re forgetting that you can’t sell anything if you don’t create an emotional connection with people. That’s why this wedding is such a sales booster. It makes people happy, if only for a little bit, to feel engaged with it.
Emotional engagement trumps rational interest every time. And events like the royal wedding give us hope. Hope, after all, is what politicians count on to influence voters; hope is what sells every perfume and cosmetic ever marketed to women. It’s the marketing not of what is, but what could be. The possibilities, the potential. That’s part of our vicarious thrill over Will and Kate’s wedding, and what we’re buying into: Every silver coin, etched mug, or faux-sapphire ring we buy connects us to them, making us feel part of something positive and joyous.
Sure, on some suppressed rational, intellectual level, we know it’s fictional — a love story of our collective imaginations — and we realize, of course, that one day the bubble will burst. We’ll come across some blog about William’s feather fetish and secret lovechild with Bjork, or the paparazzi will catch Kate topless on a nameless island, canoodling with a Beefeater (who wouldn’t, given the chance?) and then we’ll mourn for them both (Will and Kate, not Bjork or the Beefeater – sorry, someone’s gotta play the villain).
Or maybe we’ll just gloat a little. And introduce Bristol to Prince Harry.
Now that would be a feather in our cap.

This Blogger’s Books from
The Power of Small: Why Little Things Make All the Difference
by Linda Kaplan Thaler, Robin Koval
The Power of Nice: How to Conquer the Business World With Kindness
by Linda Kaplan Thaler, Robin Koval

Follow Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/KTGtweets

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

TGIF everyone, here’s my Top 5 for December 3, 2010 from Len Berman at www.ThatsSports.com.
1. Quick Hits
* LeBron James drops 38 points on the Cavs in his return to Cleveland. Miami wins 118-90.
* In Thursday night football, Michael Vick leads Philadelphia to a 34-24 win over Texas.
* Former Cubs third baseman and broadcaster Ron Santo succumbs to cancer at the age of 70.
* Former Yankee Jim Leyritz was sentenced to one year probation and fined $500 for his drunken driving conviction. The traffic accident in 2007 resulted in a woman’s death.
* Sources say the Yankees and Mariano Rivera are close on a 2-year, $30 million contract.
* The final score for the U.S. is 2-nil. Russia will host the 2018 World Cup, Qatar 2022. The U.S. was in the running for 2022.
* Tiger Woods shoots a 65 to take a one shot lead in the Chevron World Challenge in Thousand Oaks, California.
* Apples and Oranges. Syracuse will play in the inaugural Pinstripe Bowl against a Big 12 opponent at Yankee Stadium on December 30th.
2. Hot In Cleveland
They booed, waved lots of negative signs and chanted “a-hole” at LeBron James last night in Cleveland. So do the fans feel better now after James annihilated their Cavs? It reminded me of when Michael Jordan came back to Madison Square Garden after his “retirement,” and scored a cool 55, without, of course, the signs and name-calling. Last night James pretty much quieted Cleveland fans. Now if he can only put on a performance like that in the 7th game of the NBA finals, he’ll shut-up everyone else.
3. Value Added
Thanks to subscriber Gary A. for alerting us that the Mets are offering perks for those who pay their full season ticket bill early. You get to take batting practice and shag fly balls for starters. Gary also won a drawing to stand at the end of the dugout and high five the players as they take the field for a game. Here’s the part of the proceedings where I usually insert some wise-ass comment, but not this time. I actually think this is pretty cool. Your turn Yankees!
4. Friday eMailbag
Subscriber G.M. doesn’t care for the decision clearing Auburn quarterback Cam Newton of any wrongdoing. He writes “The NCAA has just opened Pandora’s Box with its Cam Newton decision. Parents of gifted athletes were just given the green light to negotiate a pay day for themselves as long as they don’t tell junior. What crap.”
As to the burning question of whether or not LeBron James intentionally bumped his coach, R. L concludes, guilty as charged. “He can change direction in mid-air – (so) James purposely bumped Spoelstra.”
M.W. chimed in with the “true meaning” of Derek Jeter. “My 17-year-old son said it best. He was trying to explain baseball to his English cousin, who said, “I only know about Derek Jeter, I don’t know who the Yankees are.”
And with TCU joining the Big East and with conference names making less and less sense, E.G. makes a good point, “Who knew the NHL had it right all those years ago with the Patrick Division and the Norris Division?”
5. Spanning The World
This week’s Spanning the World highlight is an all-time classic. It’s today’s bonus birthday boy leading the crowd in singing (make that mumbling) Take Me Out to the Ballgame at Wrigley Field in Chicago. Enjoy!
Have a great weekend everyone.
Happy Birthday: East Germany’s two-time Olympic gold medal winning figure skater Katarina Witt. 45.
Bonus Birthday: Ozzie Osbourne. 62.
Today In Sports: The Golden State Warriors terminate the contract of Latrell Sprewell for choking his coach. 1997.
Bonus Event: Plop plop fizz fizz. Alka Seltzer goes on sale. 1931.
To sign up for Len’s free daily Top 5 email click here.

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

The 17th-century French playwright Moliere had the right idea. He not only skewered the powerful, he championed the powerless, noting: “Every good act is charity. A man’s true wealth is the good that he does in this world to his fellows.”
The next time you’re in midtown Manhattan, remember the sentiment. In a tough economic climate, there is an easy way to honor it. Since 1902, Volunteers of America has used a familiar figure — Sidewalk Santas — to collect money for vital social services. For busy New Yorkers, the program is a simple way to contribute to charity; for recipients, it can be a lifesaving gesture.
The VOA’s seasonal campaign – the Holiday Food Voucher Program — benefits thousands. A signature sight through Christmas Eve, Sidewalk Santas target midtown Manhattan; since 1902, they’ve been ringing their bells at storefronts and street corners. And thanks to the generosity of those who give, the elderly, formerly homeless families and the chronically ill aren’t forgotten.
Here’s how it works — the food voucher program gives recipients cards that let them purchase and prepare a meal, rather than rely on a soup kitchen or pantry. The VOA services, however, are year-round, helping the mentally ill, kids with developmental issues and people with HIV/AIDS, among others. One of the nation’s oldest and largest human services organizations, VOA serves nearly 50,000 people in need in the Greater New York area every year. (It also has 54 affiliates in 300 cities nationwide, one of the world’s largest and most comprehensive nonprofit human services organizations.)
Volunteers of America-Greater New York president/CEO, Richard Motta explains why the organization is essential:
Why is VOA so important to the city?
VOA has been helping people in need put food on their table since 1896, the year the charity came into existence. Back then, staff used to deliver food, now we give food vouchers, but the intention remains the same: to help feed the hungry, care for those in need, and engage others in the community to respond, year-round and especially during the holidays.
Which stores honor the vouchers?
The food voucher is only available through Volunteers of America-Greater New York. We have partnered with most of the large grocery store chains in the city again this year, including A&P, Pathmark, Waldbaum’s, King Kullen and Food Emporium.
Where else do you get monies?
We’ve received a $20,000 contribution from the Greater New York Hospital Association, and a portion of the funds raised at our annual gala on Dec. 8 will help fund the Holiday Food Voucher Program.
Does VOA fill in when government can’t?
Thousands of New Yorkers go to bed hungry, or are at risk for hunger should they lose their job. Or their rents goes up or they have unexpected medical expenses. VOA’s Sidewalk Santas serve as a gentle reminder that everyone has to do what they can to help their neighbors in need.
For more information: www.sidewalksantaVOA.org

This Blogger’s Books from
Pride and Prejudice (Great Illustrated Classics)
by Jane Austen, Fern Siegel
The Picture of Dorian Gray (Great Illustrated Classics, F224-47)
by Oscar Wilde, Adapted by Fern Siegel

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Content Aggregation, Curation, and Syndication is core to the vision
Ran Harveno smiles when he tells you he isn’t the ‘new’ head of AOL Video, he’s the first person to have that job. As he sees it – it’s a sign of the times that big web players see video as core to their future.
“The news is that there is an AOL video department” said Harveno, speaking to a packed house of the New York Video Meetup at the Samsung Experience in the Time Warner Center.
The fact that one of the biggest companies out there believes in video. AOL is becoming a way more innovative company.”
“There is no real video company right now on the web that is making more than half a billion dollars. YouTube is at five hundred million. I think that AOL has a great chance to scale and become a really powerful video company. They have a lot of traffic on their own, but it’s billions of page views with a very limited video experience so far.”
Looking at the web, he sees lots of folks chasing the ‘sexy’ world of entertainment video, while the web’s audience is looking for information. He sees a huge opportunity in premium ad dollars and premium content – but in the nitchified web world, premium audiences are in nitches, not in mass audiences.
“The web is about niches. Its’ about information”, said Harveno. “Health is not that sexy – so is food,home and garden. There’s no unified experience, there’s no curated library of premium content that people can consume. On the other hand, most of the sites out there are text.”
And in taking on the new world of web video, AOL found a guy who had been diligently and steadily winning the key target verticals, one category at a time.
“The goal is to start shifting real dollars from TV to the web. Which we don’t see enough. The biggest problem of the online video industry is supply. There are not enough views. People are looking at this as the next revolution and huge adoption – if you compare the video views on the web to inventory that exists on TV, we’re still a fraction.”
Today his company, 5min Media, founded just 4 years ago in Tel Aviv, is number one in health, food, home, fashion, autos the biggest verticals for advertisers.
5min gathers professional quality content, and then provides syndication revenue to content creators. Harveno says his goal is to be the ‘supply’ side of supply and demand. “We basically aggregate a lot of content. 200,000 pieces of content. And it’s all curated. It’s Scripps, Hachette, Hearst, TBS, NBC, and a lot of web originals like Next New Networks and Revision 3.”
By aggregating and curating niches, Harveno says he can create quality audiences that will drive CPM’s up, rather than commoditizing mass audiences that drive CPM’s down.
“What we’re trying right now at AOL is to create a market where you have the premium layer of good content on the home page and on the site and a huge audience extension with 5min, which is growing all the time. and through ad.com and really create a good marketplace for advertisers.”
“We are going to take the 5min library and our content partners live on every AOL page. We’re live right now 18 sites. We have 50 to go. We’re taking our videos and our semantic technology all across the web. 5min has the brand and the syndication play. Ad.com is a video network. We unified the AOL video unit.”
5min began its relationship with AOL as a provider of syndicated video, but once AOL exec’s saw the impact of 5min’s library on traffic and conversions, an acquisition conversation moved along quickly. AOL bought 5min for a reported 65 million dollars, a meaningful return for the venture firms who’d put 13 million dollars in the company over the past four years.
Now that Harveno is SVP of Video – he says job one is getting more content into the network. “We want content. One of the things that is critical for every big company is to have a have self-produced content, and aggregated content.We can’t produce it all.”
And he sees 5min’s brand and publisher services as remaining core to what they do. He says sites need his brand of quality content. “If you go to most of the travel sites, most of the food sites, there’s a very poor video experience with these sites. So we basicaly understood all the good content producers that don’t find a good ROI on the web and aggregate them in a curated way.” Getting quality content to publishers is core to Harveno’s vision. And he says that companies that try to manufacture video at a low cost have the model wrong. You can’t create all your own content with good economics. Harveno: “There is only one company that is trying to produce all of its own content – Demand Media. I think that the content quality that they produce is questionable. If you want to produce real good content, and not content for one hundred bucks, you need to aggregate.”
Says Harveno: “What we’re trying to do is to create an ROI for content producers though distribution, and extend it through AOL so it’s an opportunity to be on the home page. To be on the home pages of all their sites and to be in the 5min network.”
So, given that this is largest video company sale in New York, how does Harveno, from his spot at AOL, see the next chapter for video? “The big old companies didn’t take video seriously so far. So I think there will be more acquisitions.”

This Blogger’s Books from
Curation Nation: How to Win in A World Where Consumers are Creators
by Steven Rosenbaum
7 Days in September: A Powerful Story About 9/11
Directed by Steve Rosenbaum

Follow Steve Rosenbaum on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/magnify

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

As the leading arbiters of hip culture (self-appointed and otherwise) take their talents to South Beach for Art Basel Miami, we name the 10 men who are shaping the art world’s sartorial agenda from within–and setting a new standard for the way style-conscious guys everywhere are getting dressed.
Text and captions by Gilt MANual, the Web’s most entertaining guide to men’s style.
Tobias Meyer
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10 Perfect Plus-Size Party Dresses (PHOTOS, POLL)
Rosario Dawson, Anna Wintour & Diane Von Furstenberg Hit NYC & Company Foundation’s 2010 Leadership Awards Gala (PHOTOS, POLL)
Jeggings: Yay Or Nay? (POLL)
Ally Hilfiger Dons Llama Accessorizes, Collects Slippers (PHOTOS, VIDEO)
This Week on Etsy: 19 Gifts to Fit Every Holiday Purse
Beauty and The Brain: Why Red Lipstick Is More Important Than You Think (PHOTOS)
A double-breasted wide-lapel tux that would give Tom Ford himself a run for his money. Also giving Tom Ford (or anyone else) a run for their money: that Rothko Meyer’s auctioning off.
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Earlier this week, HBO aired the critically acclaimed documentary Miracle (2001), which took us back through all the elements leading up to Team USA’s “Miracle On Ice” Gold medal performance in hockey at Lake Placid in 1980. The story lines for that team and those events still transcend time.
As we know, “Miracle on Ice” told the story of the dogged, underdog, youthful Americans battling the evil Soviet Empire, and how their hard work and success captured a nation and helped turn the tide of negativity in the United States at the time. It was a great example of the power of sport, and was a great time for American sport on an international stage, especially with the games on U.S. soil. In so many ways, the ebb and flow of life has changed time and again since those days in Lake Placid. The dominance of the Soviet Union has come and gone along with so many changes in our everyday lives, both positive and negative. Our focus is on adversaries of a much more stealth nature today, ones that are probably more dangerous and deadly than whatever was faced during the Cold War.
However, in the world of sport, one thing that has risen again is the imprint Russian sport is making on the global landscape. The latest example came Thursday, when Russia was awarded the 2018 World Cup, outdistancing several European powers in sport and business to gain the honor of hosting the World’s greatest single sport event for the first time. The World Cup will follow the Sochi Winter Games in 2014, and are the latest example of a culture which once embraced global dominance in sport coming to embrace sport fully once again.
There is a difference in the Russian sport landscape today from days of old, though. Whereas the old Soviet Union looked to take its might and exert its excellence across the board with its collective athletes, the Russia of today is looking to use athletics much more as a bridge for commerce and success. Bringing global dollars INTO the country, which will happen with the Olympics and the World Cup, is just as or even more important than the on field dominance during the Cold War days.
Even outside of the large scale events now coming to Russia, the idea of sport for commerce and brand is growing in ways never before seen. Women’s tennis now has a large cadre of elite and marketable Russian players, many of whom schooled and trained in the United States, who dominate both the game and the commercial brand marketplace. The New Jersey Nets made their big splash by bringing Mikhail Prokhorov on board as owner last spring, and his presence has had a profound impact on the marketing and visibility of the team… a team which in two years will move into a community, Brooklyn, with perhaps the fastest growing Russian population in the world. Nets sponsors with Russian ties now trump their American ones in many categories, and the team launched a Russian language website this week. The change is even being seen in hockey (the subject of Miracle, as we know), where the KHL continues to exert branding and contract dollars in an effort to become a Pan European league which someday may be a partner of the still dominant NHL.
What does the new Russian sport model mean for the business? For brands looking to activate in the country and the surrounding Republics it will probably still be a slow go, as the economy is still in a mode that is reflective and sometimes less stable than the rest of the world. However, for properties looking to bring the brands of the new Russian economy to a new audience, or for entities looking to engage in brand building around the mega-events now going to Russia, there is great possibility. The Nets, and perhaps with other teams to follow, seem to have broken the code on bringing Russian brands to American consumer exposure, and those brands which do succeed in growing will look to other opportunities. Businesses which can find ways to navigate the Russian system may also find dollars and brand share, so long as they do not compete with the privately held Russian companies that still have a stranglehold on a good number of essential categories.
The new Russia has embraced sport as a way to gain global positioning, just like the Soviet Union of old. However, the difference is the embrace of today is much more on the commercial side than on the physical side, and has many more areas of cash flow, opportunity and brand building than was ever seen during the traditional Communist regime of the past. The similarity, some say, whether it is having elite athletes dominate the world or elite events showcased on Russian soil, is that it is still chiefly about Russian growth and only Russian growth, although that may be changing. Even with all the big picture success, the country remains one in transition, with small pockets of wealth and large infrastructure problems. Maybe this growth in sport can help change that position as well. Big events bring big dollars from outside, and marquee athletes who are flourishing in the west in some sports can be great ambassadors in breaking down stereotypes.
So while Thursday’s World Cup announcement brought more disappointment to the United States (who lost out to Qatar for the 2022 World Cup), it brought more promise for an emerging economy, one which was a fierce enemy of the United States not too long ago. It is true that there is no real long-term proven effect that building stadia and bringing transient fans to an area has for the economy. South Africa, for example, is still a lot of TBD following the perhaps most successful World Cup ever. However, if that economic progress continues, maybe the doors to commerce can open more for global brands, which would be positive news for the economy all over, including those based in the States who engage in the business of sport.
Positive news for Russian sport helping the U.S.? It certainly is a different world from the days of Lake Placid. That’s hopefully a good thing for all.

Follow Joe Favorito on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/joefav

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

by Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium blogger
The most recent round of United Nations-led climate change negotiations began this week in Cancun, and although international expectations are muted this year, the stakes are still high. As Mother Jones’ Kate Sheppard explains,”The 2010 meeting could make or break the future of global negotiations.” This is the sixteenth Conference of the Parties, convened by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). After the tepid results of last year’s conference in Copenhagen, when a last-minute, backroom deal produced a non-binding accord, participants and observers of the negotiations are beginning to question whether it is the best forum for these sorts of conversations. Central to the progress, or lack thereof, on international climate change policy is the United States’ intransigence. As one of the world most proliferate carbon spewers, it’s essential for the United States to commit to dramatic reductions in its carbon emissions. But if American negotiators have always been reluctant to make those promises, even if they did this year, their promises would ring empty. The results of the 2010 midterms mean there’s little chance Congress would ratify a treaty. Republicans just eliminated a special House committee on global warming. They certainly aren’t interested in making the sorts of concessions that international negotiators want and need to convince their own governments to move forward. Signing off It’s unclear, at this point, if the UNFCCC framework will ever produce a worthwhile results. Inter Press Service’s Kanya D’Almeida reports that “the meeting in Cancn is foreshadowed by a deep pessimism.” D’Almedia offers, for instance, this take from Nigel Purvis, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States: The last landmark climate treaty–the Kyoto Protocol, which the United States never signed onto–will expire in 2012. The Copenhagen Accord, the agreement that came out of last year’s negotiations, does not bind countries to their commitments, as Kyoto did. The next major step in tackling climate change could be for countries across the world to re-up their commitments to reducing carbon emissions through a Kyoto-like (i.e. legally enforceable) pact. The alternative is to base global action on an agreement along the lines of the one produced at Copenhagen, with less stringent standards for accountability. Kyoto v. Copenhagen Tina Gephardt writes at The Nation that “Serious tensions threaten to derail the UNFCCC process entirely. At the heart of these skirmishes are two camps: those nations who want to extend the Kyoto Protocol and those nations, including the United States, who want to ram through the Copenhagen Accord.” The Accord’s mechanism for oversight and enforcement relies on countries monitoring each others’ progress on carbon reductions, but as Mother Jones’ Sheppard reports, an early point of disagreement in this year’s session centers on how important it is to agree how that monitoring will happen. Stubborn Americans What does seem certain is that if, at the end of this session, international climate negotiations have become so messy and tangled the world abandons them, and starts over, much of the blame will lie with the United States. Tom Athanasiou lays out the case in Earth Island Journal: It’s not that American leaders aren’t aware of the problems the world could face (although some on the right continue to deny they exist). As Nancy Roberts points out at Care2, “Up to one billion people could be displaced by rising sea levels this century.” To a certain extent, the United States is insulated from the impact of climate change. As this map, which ColorLines highlighted a few weeks ago, illustrates, America is not particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. But it’d be foolish for American leaders to ignore the security and economic implications wrought by the migration of one-sixth of the world’s population. Reaction But Washington has shown time after time that it is willing to look past problems until they become unavoidable. The consequences of that attitude have been devastating in recent years. The BP oil spill is only the most recent example. This week the Obama administration announced it would not open up new coastline areas in the southeastern U.S. for offshore oil drilling–a decision that came only after it became clear just how much havoc a drilling disaster could cause (and would likely cause again). With climate change, however, the tons of carbon already in the atmosphere can’t be mopped up or “dispersed,” or forgotten, within months. The consequences will linger on, and by the time they become clear, it will be too late to act, and international negotiators won’t be talking about emission levels, but food, water, and refugee crises. This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

Follow The Media Consortium on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/tmcmedia

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

John Boehner, he of the (fill in your orange skin joke here), has said on multiple occasions that the recent elections, in which the GOP kicked so much Democratic ass that even downright scary, religio-crazy, swirly eyed yahoos won races across the country, were a mandate for the GOP agenda. Boehner has said Americans now want the Congress to roll back the health care law. He’s also adamant that the victory gave him a clear mandate to extend tax cuts for all Americans, including the uber-wealthy.
Of course, neither of these things is remotely true. A post-election poll by the Associated Press found that a mere 31 percent of respondents wanted to repeal the health care law completely. Further, 20 percent want it untouched, and a plurality of 38 percent think the law did not go far enough. Sure, people are upset by the health care law. But most people are upset by it because they wanted more. Most people wonder what ever happened to the public option, which liberals conceded to as a fallback, compromise position from the single-payer system they wanted.
As for taxes, just yesterday, CBS News released a poll that found just a quarter of respondents wanted tax cuts for everyone, while 53 percent wanted tax cuts extended for just families hauling in less than $250,000 per year. A smaller group, 14 percent, want the Bush tax cuts ended for everyone, and hey, at least those people are deficit hawks worthy of the name, unlike the Republicans now in Congress. And here’s the real kicker: Just 46 percent of Republicans polled, less than half, want tax cuts extended for everyone. That represents a plurality of Republicans, with 41 percent wanting just the middle class cuts, but if the Republicans in Congress aren’t even carrying out the will of the majority of their base, and far from the will of the American people at large, just who the hell are they catering to?
What good, what usefulness, derives from the Republican agenda? The plan they now offer represents more deficits and cannot even claim the support of the GOP’s own base, much less America. Who can support these jackals? And why?
Remember right after the 2008 election, when it looked as if the GOP would be wandering in the wilderness for the next decade or three? Back then, a lot of commentators said that the Republican Party had become a regional phenomenon, a Southern, white party with little cachet in the rest of the country. Those commentators were right, after a fashion. The GOP is a minority party, but the South is just a desperately needed voting base. The real clientele of the Grand Old Party are, solely, the people who stand to gain from income tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, from the abolition of the estate tax, from cuts in capital gains taxes. The GOP, at this point in its history, represents solely the interests of the stratospherically wealthy. When their agenda isn’t popular with America, or in some cases even their own party, but would benefit almost entirely the wealthiest people, that is the only rational conclusion.
Conservative commentators would call what I just wrote “class warfare.” They’d say that I’m fomenting resentment of the rich for no good purpose. To them, I offer the words of Warren Buffett: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

Follow Dan Sweeney on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/Daniel_Sweeney

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Natalie Portman as Nina in Black Swan by Niko Tavernise.
At the heart of Darren Aronofsky’s melodrama Black Swan about a desperate ballerina is not so much a movie about winning and competition, though it is partially that, but more to the (not only toe-shoe) point, depicting the torture good girls put themselves through. In this film, the message is that longing and desire (be it for sex or a special role) are the very things that can take us over the top–both orgasmically and professionally–to making us stand out in a crowd and then, alas, are the very things that inevitably take us down.
Natalie Portman, a Harvard-educated actress, is ideal casting then: the perfectionist who got away.
Inside every good girl Aronofsky postulates, every White Swan–or Odette, as she is called in the original Swan Lake ballet–is a Black Swan (Odile) just waiting to burst out. In Black Swan, she is called Nina and the exorcism is via her own hand and a shard of glass, but it is just a way of punishing her for finally heeding her director’s advice to free her repressed sexuality, on the dance floor and with him in bed, so she can become the great dancer she is meant to be.
I recently wrote more about Love and Ballet and Swan Lake. Odette has the bigger role and the most famous, lush Tchaikovsky music to accompany her, but everyone really wants to play Odile, as it is much more fun to be powerful and disruptive and fouette yourself into oblivion.
But you don’t necessarily have to have this in mind when you see Black Swan. We all know about Good Girls in every walk of life. Good girls study hard, raise their hand (or their long legs) in class, arrive early and stay late, listen to their mothers (even if they are Barbara Hershey in the Mama Rose role she was always meant to play), and keep quiet even if threatened by a predatory colleague who is out to steal their straight-A status–all the while studying or dancing even harder to prove their mettle. Anyone who has ever been a good girl wanting to be a bad girl–and that means most of us–will recognize the complete mess that is Nina Sayers (Portman).
The real antecedent of Black Swan is not The Turning Point, a 1977 film with a similarly controlling mother, or even Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Red Shoes (more on this in a minute), it is Gelsey Kirkland’s I-was-a-good-girl-who-went -bad memoir, Dancing on My Grave. If anyone at the top of the dance world has been felled by ambition, drugs, venal colleagues and sex it was Kirkland, now resurrected as a downtown ballet mistress, but once upon a time just plain self-reported mistress to her fave drugs and men.
A confession: I was a child dancer. Anointed by Balanchine to be an SAB student because of my long legs and shorter torso, I went into meltdown when I imagined that my mother had abandoned me after dance class one evening on Broadway. As it turned out, she was just trying to find a parking spot. I know what it’s like to think that dancing can make you your own, evil vampire twin. Resentful of the time it took to get me to Manhattan and wary of the life of a dancer (who would marry me?) my mother was not like Nina’s. Before the advent of helicoptering, aspiring for one’s children was not always considered a primary good.
But I digress. Because ballet dancing, in all its perfectionist glory, or gory as Aronofsky would have it, is about repressing your natural self–shoving your toes in a satin box for hours on end, starving yourself to achieve the perfect line, taking classes every day to improve technique, sucking up to your ballet masters and mistresses, hoping a choreographer will want you for his/her next big ballet–it is the perfect vehicle for a contemporary, masochistic coming-of-age.
Nina–she of the pretty-in-pink of the girlish bedroom replete with stuffed animals who sits in corridors anxiously awaiting the posting of the parts–is an ardent hopeful. When Thomas (Vincent Cassel), the movie’s version of Balanchine who beds his leading ladies while making them do 32 fouettes, says, “Go home and touch yourself,” of course she immediately does. Anything, especially sex, for art. “Would you fuck that girl,” Thomas asks his leading male dancer, invoking the apparent barometer for good work and achievement, and thus ridding the movie of any subtlety at all. The previous Chosen One, played in seriously Joan Crawford style by Winona Ryder–at last given a chance to have the temper tantrums to show just how nasty the last years have been for her personally–is evidence of what can happen when you do “touch” yourself.
Movie lovers have apparently come out versus balletomanes on this one–the former defending Aronofsky’s literal, anti-feminist take (hey, when in doubt have the leading ladies get it on), the latter decrying the very same. Portman has been everywhere discussing how little they ate at Aronofsky’s behest, how many hours they practiced every day (only her upper body and furrowed brow are really visible when she is dancing) and how she and Mila Kunis really, really like each other. Kunis has the unenviable task of playing Lily, the shadowy competitor who lures Nina with lesbian sex, drugs, and wild nights out.
All four of these actresses are smart and nuanced in a film that is less so. Black Swan is a vampire movie in feathered disguise–and at one point the fangs literally come out. It looks great, but subtle it is not. Eventually, at the end, the film sheds all pretense of being a serious look at women, ballet and what-makes-Nina-run, and devolves into an Exorcist-style blood and vampire flick that actually is more fun.
Other contemporary ballet films serve up similar tales of ambition versus personal life, but you would do better to see The Red Shoes, recently re-released by the marvelous Criterion Collection, which gets the ballet, the girl, and her dilemma much righter and is in the most gorgeous Technicolor, or the Kneehigh/Emma Rice original production at St. Ann’s Warehouse in New York.
I’m hoping this Dancing-with-the-Scars dark fairy tale–for it feels like Aronofsky has gone back to the fabulistic Germanic roots of the original Swan Lake narrative–does not really mean the only fix for good girls is just a dose of self-stimulation with a bit of Sappho and the boss on the side which rebounds on us anyway, in the end.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Sinterklaas Rhinebeck is everything you want in a village holiday celebration. A full day of activities starts at 10 AM this Saturday, December 4, and runs non-stop until midnight. For a full schedule of the festivities, click here. Sinterklaas Rhinebeck is a reprisal of an old Dutch tradition, which in turn was based on ancient celebrations.
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House Swaps — Taking the Kids to Savannah (PHOTOS)
10 Moscow Attractions To See If The City Hosts The World Cup (PHOTOS)
A Day In Fun-Loving, Historic Cape Town (PHOTOS)
How Healthy Is Your Favorite Airline? A Food Survey Of America’s Top 8 Airlines (PHOTOS)
The Beatles’ India: The Fab Four’s Former Ashram (PHOTOS)
London, The Walking City
Photo Courtesy of Sinterklaas Rhinebeck
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Throughout the day at every turn in the village and in many venues, performers and activities engage visitors, leading up to the Starlight Parade — a historic recreation of an old Dutch parade with Sinterklaas on his Horse, The Turtle, The Snow Geese, The Seven Sisters, Giant Figures, Music, Stilt Walkers, The Wild Women, the Grumpus, Creatures of the Woods, Rip Van Winkle, the Dancing Bears, Fire Jugglers and All the Children and Townfolk. Think Mardi Gras meets Sesame Street, it’s visual and fantastic and G-rated.
For families, you’ll find Sinter Cirkus and Vaudeville Show with the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus and the Hey-Ya Brothers, marionettes, ice sculpting, storytelling, crafting and creative opportunities all over Rhinebeck. This is one day that parents will not hear the dreaded refrain of “I’m bored, there’s nothing to do.”
Adults enjoying Sinterklaas might opt for brunch with the general at the Dar House. Revolutionary War re-enactor Gary Petagine will depict General George Montgomery and tell first-hand stories from his life. At the Lutheran church, a full set of performances include Woodstock Renaissance and Mystic Minstrels at the Musicale. After the Parade, there is a dance for adults at Starr Place featuring a Battle of the Bands between the fabulous Dixieland sound of the On The Lam Band and the wild Balkan rhythms of the Raya Brass Band.
When you’re hungry the renowned restaurants of Rhinebeck are making special treats for Sinterklaas. If you want to stay over in Rhinebeck, great places like Whistlewood Farm, Veranda House, Olde Rhinebeck Inn and the Beekman Arms welcome Sinterklaas revelers.
Rhinebeck, NY is an easy 90 minute drive north of New York City, and is accessible via Amtrak to Rhinecliff, NY.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Unless you’ve frozen your Thanksgiving turkey carcass, it’s too late to make this soup now. But if you make a turkey for Christmas, or just for any old reason, this soup will be one of the best things to come from it. This soup has a special place in my family’s heart. It’s the soup my mother-in-law Rita makes (still, at age 89!) whenever we come to visit. If it’s not ready when we get in late at night, it’s surely served for lunch the next day, even if we try to make things easy for her by getting pizza or something. But there are certain things that must be done to make it Rita’s: There must be RING noodles. There must be cut-up carrots. And it must be accompanied by a sprinkling of Romano cheese. If Lou’s sister Liz is around, there will be no peas because Liz (at age 50-plus) does not eat cooked peas. But otherwise, we all love peas in it.
If your turkey makes more broth than you want for soup, put the extra broth in a glass jar (leaving and inch or two space for it to expand) and put it in the freezer for later. Don’t forget to label it! I am not giving measurements here because it depends on both the size of your turkey and your preferences…it’s hard to go wrong here.
Turkey Soup
Ingredients:
1 turkey carcass
Water
Salt
Ring noodles
Carrots
Peas (optional)
Romano cheese
Directions:
1. Stuff the turkey carcass into a giant soup pot and cover with water.
2. Bring to a boil and let simmer for a few hours (until everything has fallen apart and the water has turned into broth)
3. Add salt to taste.
4. Strain the bits from the broth. At this point, freeze what you are not going to use right away, and leave the rest in a smaller pot on the stove.
5. In a separate pot, boil the ring noodles until done.
6. Cut up carrots and add to the broth. Add peas, if using. Bring broth to a boil.
7. When the ring noodles are done, strain them, and add as many as you want to the broth (they will continue to expand, so it’s better to add a bit too few than a bit too many, if you ask me.)
Let people add their own grated Romano cheese at the table (and more salt and pepper, too). Yum. Tastes like love to me.
Related Links:
The Cranberry Sauce Controversy (with Recipe & Poll) – Maria’s Farm Country Kitchen
Heritage Turkey Guide: Cook the Tastiest Bird – Rodale.com
I’m Dreaming of a Green Christmas – Mother Nature Network
For more from Maria Rodale, go to www.mariasfarmcountrykitchen.com.

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The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (“Deficit Commission”) was charged with coming up with a plan to reduce the budget deficits and accumulated debt caused by tax cuts for the rich and military spending increases. It was supposed to come up with a bipartisan package that, taken as a whole, would get votes from both sides of the aisle. It was supposed to vote by Dec. 1, and it was only supposed to issue recommendations if they got 14 votes.
It didn’t work out that way. Dec. 1 has passed and the out-of-business commission apparently can’t get the required 14 votes. The commission has failed.
What happened? Two hidden agendas were brought to the table, undermining the commission’s work. Both come from longstanding campaigns by corporate-backed conservatives to undermine trust in, and ultimately defund democratic government. The first was an attack on Social Security. The second was a demand for even more tax cuts for the rich. It is no surprise that these undermined the deficit commission; the well-funded corporate-conservative anti-government agenda now undermines every effort to govern our country, solve our problems and help our people.
From the start it was clear that the agenda to undermine Social Security was going to be a problem for the commission. Wall Street billionaire Peter G. Peterson’s Foundation, whose ongoing mission seems to be to turn Social Security over to Wall Street, was involved from the start (in many ways instigating the idea), even providing the commission with free staff. Peterson also launched a concurrent, multi-front public relations campaign involving town hall meetings, planting “news” stories – even starting its own “news” outfit, and releasing various “reports” calling for Social Security cuts.
The commission did not help itself. After getting off to a slow start, the commission met in secret and maintained an elite attitude, undermining its credibility with the public. It ignored deficit and debt solutions the public favors, instead spending much of its time and energy on Social Security, which by law cannot borrow so it cannot add to the deficit. The focus appeared to be ideological, never addressing the fallout of the financial crisis or proven debt solutions like investing to grow the economy which reduces the debt’s percentage of GDP, and creating jobs which brings in additional tax revenue.
Members even insulted citizens and mocked their concerns. In June Commission co-chair Alan Simpson ranted at Alex Lawson of Social Security Works on camera, making it clear that the co-chair of the commission did not understand basic facts about the way Social Security is funded!
As CAF’s Richard Eskow explained at the time in his post, Simpson’s Social Security Video Rant: Why It’s Important,
Now it is that future and the commission has failed.
Then there was Simpson’s famous “milk cow with 310 million tits” comment that angered women, all sane people, and probably even the dairy industry. See”310 Million Tits” – If Simpson Doesn’t Resign, The President Must Fire Him, by Richard Eskow, Milk Cow Blues: Why The Alan Simpson Flap Won’t Go Away by Richard Eskow and Women Confront Deficit Commission Over Social Security by some guy.
Then, to make matters worse, in September another agenda surfaced when some commission members insisted that the commission propose tax cuts for the rich. As Talking Points Memo reported at the time,
Finally, when it was becoming clear last month that the commission was going to fail, its agenda-laden co-commissioners tried another path, releasing their own agenda packaged as commission recommendations but voted on by NO members of the commission. Of course the agenda included cuts in Social Security and tax cuts for the wealthy. As I wrote then, in Simpson & Bowles Show Deficit Commission Is Cover For An Agenda,
They have released their own “plan,” separate from what the deficit commission might release, allow the press to refer to it as the commission’s plan, and say they are sticking with it no matter what the commission does. Why? It is clear these two came into this with an agenda to attack Social Security, and are using their role on the commission as cover for their agenda.
[. . .] Agenda: Simpson and Bowles say they won’t compromise their plan to get 14 votes from the commission. What does that mean to a commission that is not supposed to release any plan without getting 14 votes? This clearly demonstrates that Simpson and Bowles have an agenda apart from the goals of the deficit commission.
As CAF’s Terrance Heath wrote Tuesday in his post, America Speaks. Will Washington Listen?
On the one hand, the commission’s co-chairs issued a chairman’s mark that essentially painted a big fat bulls-eye on Social Security. On the other hand, the co-chairs went out of their way to separate Social Security from the mission of the deficit reduction. So, why include Social Security in a deficit reduction plan if Social Security has nothing to do with deficit reduction?
Maybe someone at the commission is half listening to what Americans are saying about Social Security. Numerous polls show a majority of Americans oppose cuts in Social Security — including cuts in benefits and cuts via raising the employment age. Our August 2010 joint poll with Democracy Corps showed that 68% of Americans oppose major cuts in Social Security and Medicare to reduce the deficit. Additionally, 65% oppose raising the Social Security retirement age. A poll by Social Security Works and Lake Research, conducted between October 31 and November 2, 2010, showed thatoverall 82% oppose cutting Social Security to reduce the deficit, 63% oppose cutting Social Security benefits, and 69% oppose raising the retirement age. If the deficit commission and the administration were really listening to the American people, they’d take social security off the table.
The key point:
Again and again, Americans have spoken and said that they want their leaders to focus on creating jobs and fixing the economy. The existence of the deficit commission, let alone its co-chair’s proposals, reflect that few in Washington are listening.
There are good proposals for cutting the deficit without gutting Social Security and the middle class, while further enriching the already-wealthy:
First, read the proposal of The Citizens’ Commission On Jobs, Deficits And America’s Economic Future
Our Fiscal Security, a collaborative effort of Demos, the Economic Policy Institute, and The Century Foundation released a blueprint titled, Investing in America’s Economy.
Deficit commission member Jan Shakowsky offered a plan of her own.
Commission member Andy Stern has his, called The 21st Century Plan for America’s Leadership.
So at least in these proposals there is a path forward following the failure of the commission.
Is there a lesson to learn from the failure of the deficit commission? If so, it is the same lesson that can be learned by the ongoing failure of our Congress and entire political system. The corporate/conservative agenda to undermine and defund democratic government is dividing us and making us fail as a country. Which, apparently, is the plan.
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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Christina Aguilera
Buy: iTunes.com
Genre: Soundtrack
Song: Guy What Takes His Time
Album: Burlesque (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Keith Richards (The Rolling Stones)
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Genre: Rock
Song: Before They Make Me Run
Album: Some Girls (Remastered)
Pops Staples (The Staple Singers)
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Genre: R&B/Soul
Song: When Will We Be Paid (Single Version)
Album: The Very Best of the Staple Singers
Tom Waits
Buy: iTunes.com
Genre: Rock
Song: World Keeps Turning
Album: Orphans
Chris Hillman (The Byrds)
Buy: iTunes.com
Genre: Rock
Song: It Won’t Be Wrong
Album: Turn! Turn! Turn!
Paul Butterfield
Buy: iTunes.com
Genre: Blues
Song: Baby Please Don’t Go
Album: Paul Butterfield’s Better Days
Little Richard
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Genre: Rock
Song: Cherry Red
Album: Little Richard Is Back
Fletcher Henderson
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Genre: Jazz
Song: Stealin’ Apples
Album: Ken Burns Jazz – Fletcher Henderson
Jim Morrison (The Doors)
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Genre: Rock
Song: When the Music’s Over (New Stereo Mix)
Album: Strange Days (40th Anniversary Mixes)
Chet Baker
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Genre: Jazz
Song: You Don’t Know What Love Is
Album: The Best of Chet Baker Sings
Jerry Butler
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Genre: R&B/Soul
Song: Need to Belong to Somebody
Album: Best of Jerry Butler
dith Piaf
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Genre: Vocal
Song: J’m'en Fous Pas Mal
Album: dith Piaf : 30me Anniversaire
Joan Armatrading
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Genre: Rock
Song: The Weakness in Me
Album: Walk Under Ladders
Frank Zappa
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Genre: Rock
Song: Bamboozled by Love
Album: The Frank Zappa AAAFNRAA Birthday Bundle
Spike Jones
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Genre: Spoken Word
Song: Dance of the Hours
Album: Greatest Hits
Cab Calloway
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Genre: Jazz
Song: Minnie the Moocher (Theme Song)
Album: Best of Big Bands – Cab Calloway
J.J. Cale
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Genre: Rock
Song: Don’t Go to Strangers
Album: Naturally
Frank Sinatra
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Genre: Vocal
Song: The Shadow of Your Smile
Album: Sinatra at the Sands (Live)
Marianne Faithfull
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Genre: Rock
Song: Sister Morphine
Album: Marianne Faithfull: Greatest Hits
Maria Callas
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Genre: Opera
Song: Madama Butterfly: “Un Bel Di Vedremo”
Album: La Divina

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My mentor and first employer, former Beatles publicist, the late Derek Taylor, once described The Beatles as “the 20th Century’s Greatest Romance.” His poetic encapsulation of the majestic achievements of the lads from Liverpool was astute, and in that interpretation, Paul McCartney is the charismatic Aramis of the four musketeer-musicians who captured the world’s heart.
Sir Paul McCartney has traveled a long and winding road from his childhood in Liverpool to the summit of receiving his Kennedy Center Honor in Washington D.C. By the age of just 27, with his three bandmates in The Beatles, he had already completely revolutionized popular music and created a canon of work that is heralded and unsurpassed in both critical acclaim and public popularity to this day. In the 40 years since the break-up of The Beatles, he has developed into a Renaissance Man for our times. A legacy of compositions and recordings in popular music, acclaimed classical works, poetry, paintings, award-winning animated films and a pioneering presence as an activist in many spheres — including the instigation of the Concert For New York after the 9/11 attacks.
Born James Paul McCartney on June 18th 1942 in war-bombed Liverpool to Mary a nurse and Jim a cotton salesman and jazz band aficionado, he grew up in municipal housing, in blue-collar districts on the outskirts of Liverpool. At the age of 14, he lost his mother to breast cancer, and he and his younger brother Michael were thereafter raised by his father with the support of extended family. Shortly after his mother’s passing he taught himself to play the guitar and wrote his first song, I Lost My Little Girl.
One Saturday afternoon in July 1957, his friend Ivan Vaughan took him to the local church fete. Another of Ivan’s pals was playing in a skiffle group that day in front of 400 villagers. (Skiffle was the British equivalent of homemade jug-band music.) McCartney watched the Quarrymen and in particular their scruffy leader, John. After the performance, Ivan introduced his two mates. It was the Big Bang that led directly to The Beatles. If that sounds like an exaggeration, consider this: Almost ten years later to the day Paul and his new pal John — together with two other chums called George and Ringo, were performing live to 400 MILLION members of the global village on the world’s first-ever satellite TV hook-up. “All You Need Is Love” was what they sang that day. Love in all its forms was, and remains, the touchstone of Paul McCartney’s work and family life.
Paul McCartney (2nd left) performing with John Lennon (center) on Friday October 18th 1957 at the the New Clubmoor Hall in Liverpool, England. It was McCartney’s debut appearance with John’s group The Quarrymen — The Band That Became The Beatles. Photo: Leslie Kearney. Used by courtesy of The Quarrymen
Though John was older by nearly two years, Paul’s comparative mastery of the guitar and knowledge of songs of the emerging rock ‘n’ roll from America placed him ahead of his new pal in musical craft and in the very early years Paul helped John’s nascent musicianship emerge. So began a creative partnership and friendship that literally changed the world. Spurred on by a natural sibling-style rivalry, each drove the other to higher and higher creative achievements. Paul’s innate gift for melody informed John’s compositions. Lennon’s affinity for words inspired McCartney to write ever more evocative lyrics (“wearing a face that she keeps in a jar by the door”). The teenage Paul had already started composing, and as he encouraged John to do the same, they became a writing team. They wrote together “eyeball-to-eyeball” in their earliest years. From 1964 onwards they primarily composed songs on their own — yet they almost always turned to each other to polish and improve their songs.
In the span of a few years McCartney composed literally dozens of songs that became instant classics and have embedded themselves into the world’s collective DNA. Songs such as “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “Yesterday,” “Eleanor Rigby,” “Here, There and Everywhere,” “Penny Lane,” “Hey Jude” and “Let It Be.” As his three Beatle colleagues all married and settled in the Surrey countryside, it was McCartney who stayed in the heart of England’s capital in the mid-60s and immersed himself in London’s burgeoning counter-culture. He imbued theater, foreign films, art, Stockhausen, John Cage, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg. This eclecticism manifested itself in The Beatles’ landmark Sgt Pepper album in 1967 — a song cycle very much driven by Paul’s vision. In these years, McCartney also became the first Beatle to score a movie — the Hayley Mills film The Family Way, and he was the driving force behind their ahead-of-its-time Magical Mystery Tour film — which impressed (among many) a young film student called Steven Spielberg…
After The Beatles broke up at their peak in 1970, McCartney elected to restart his musical career from a virtual ground zero by creating a new band that included his wife Linda. Wings grew slowly, but by the end of the 1970s had become one of the major musical attractions of the decade, with a slew of memorable hits and world tours under its span. McCartney had proven that he could start and lead a new band on the run to the top. His humanitarian side started to manifest itself with the landmark Concerts for Kampuchea in 1979, which he helped organize and at which he performed with many stellar peers.
The world changed after the tragic loss of John Lennon in December 1980, and Paul made changes in his life. He disbanded Wings and focused more on recordings and family than live performance — though he gave one of the highlight performances at 1985′s Live Aid. His 80s recordings included hugely popular collaborations with younger performers who McCartney was always happy to work with including Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Elvis Costello.
It was in the 1980s and 1990s that McCartney broadened the creative canvas he worked on. He made a series of award-winning animated short films, re-kindled his love of painting and poetry. He also started composing acclaimed classical works. His philanthropy and passion for giving back led him to work with a team in transforming the derelict building that had housed his high school and turn it into LIPA (Liverpool Institute for the Performing Arts) — which has become Britain’s finest such academy.
Post break-up, The Beatles had defied the laws of celebrity physics and they had never gone out of fashion. They were discovered afresh by each new generation. When McCartney returned to live performance in 1989, he discovered that in addition to his loyal fans from the 1960s and 1970s, he had a new fan-base that had grown up on his solo recordings in the 1980s and had also discovered him through the omnipresent recordings of his first group — the one he was in before Wings… Since returning to the concert stage, he has made live performance a staple of his life — touring the world frequently and bringing together multiple generations at every show.
The 1990s brought both joy and sorrow. The mid-1990s release of the Beatles Anthology TV series and three companion audio albums propelled the always vibrant interest in the Beatles and McCartney to new stratospheric levels. 1997 saw the release of his Flaming Pie album that showed his gift for songwriting to be undimmed by the passage of time. In 1998, Paul lost Linda, his wife of nearly thirty years, to the same dreadful disease that had claimed his mother four decades earlier. A standing testament to the quality of their marriage has been their four children Heather, Mary, Stella and James. All with creative achievements to their credit. And never a whisper of the type of troubles that afflict so many celebrity offspring.
Most people in their sixties slow down. In the first decade of the 2000s, McCartney cranked it up to the speed of sound. Tours, albums including experimental electronic music, playing the Super-Bowl, receiving the Gershwin Prize, collaborations with younger artists and always concerts at which his music is enjoyed by audiences across the generational universe. At festivals such as Coachella and Glastonbury — the redoubt of today’s teenagers — McCartney is the cherished headliner. A musical Peter Pan from a halcyon era, some of whose music may have been written “yesterday” — yet sounds as fresh as tomorrow.
The love affair between McCartney and America has been a constant since The Beatles’ first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964 when the first glimpse America caught was Paul exuberantly singing “All My Loving.” That boyish charm and optimism was the perfect healing balm for a nation still shell-shocked from the tragic events of November 22, 1963. McCartney and The Beatles helped the rebirth of a nation, and America has never forgotten that.
The love affair has always been two-way and McCartney has spent much time in the US — a country he has always cherished. Nearly 40 years after he and The Beatles helped heal the nation’s Kennedy assassination trauma, came another calling — the horror of 9/11 — which McCartney had witnessed from the tarmac at JFK. So when America again found itself in times of trouble, it was McCartney who spoke the words of wisdom that the healing might start with what became the memorable Concert For New York. He helped round up his pals and peers including the Who, David Bowie, Eric Clapton, Mick and Keith from the Stones. It was natural that McCartney be asked to close the show.
Taking the stage after five hours of stunning music including rousing anthems by The Who that stirred the very soul of New Yorkers, McCartney performed a set that instinctively nurtured the broken-hearted people. When he sang “Yesterday,” accompanied by just a string quartet, the words he had written in 1965 as a 23-year-old soul assumed a significance far deeper than his original intent. “Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away. Now it looks as though they’re here to stay… Suddenly, I’m not half the man I used to be. There’s a shadow hanging over me…” The lyrics now articulated the emotions of a grieving nation in its hour of darkness, whose present-day had been shattered and who collectively yearned for the world they had lost. When McCartney sang “Oh I believe in Yesterday” he became a much-valued light shining through the cloudy night.
He sang for 300 million Americans and hundreds of millions more throughout the world — just as he and his pals had done in the glorious 1967 Summer of Love when they spread their message of universal love to the planet. And just as passionately as he did ten years earlier when his musical journey began in the twilight dusk of a mid-summer’s eve, in a tiny village church hall in the north of England — playing Eddie Cochran’s Twenty Flight Rock to someone he’d just met who was to become his musical blood-brother and fellow Musketeer. “All For One And One For All Together Now…”
For me, the true mark of a star of Paul McCartney’s stature is how he treats others. Most stars schmooze well with their peers and the other leaders of the pack. But many are rather less gracious with others. I still recall the first time I worked with Paul. It was in 1986 and I was producing a little promotional film about one of his heroes — Buddy Holly. I left the room where I was about to interview him for a few minutes. When I came back into the room, unnoticed by him, I discovered him chatting as warmly with the young production assistants as with the director. Paying real attention to them. A small thing you say. No, it’s a big thing. It’s what makes Paul McCartney, SIR Paul McCartney — the shining knight of our era…

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