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This past weekend–buttressed by an incredible outpouring of support from LGBT and Democratic activists, OFA supporters, and other progressive volunteers–the United States Senate voted to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” The historic vote on Saturday ended more than a decade of sanctioned discrimination in our armed forces and fulfilled a longtime priority for President Obama. At the same time, the vote showed that Democratic activists will not give up fighting for what’s right after the November elections–and that OFA can and will continue making a difference standing up for President Obama’s legislative priorities.
In recent weeks, OFA volunteers nationwide have been hard at work urging their Members of Congress to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” During the lame duck Congressional session, volunteers made tens of thousands of phone calls, wrote letters to the editor of their local newspapers, and held hundreds of local events supporting repeal. In the past week alone, volunteers dropped off nearly 600,000 signed petitions to Senators Collins, Scott Brown, and Kirk–all key swing votes that supported repeal in the end.
For me, these past few weeks have been a stark reminder of the early days of 2008. The morning after we won the Iowa caucuses, our offices in South Carolina were filled with volunteers both old and new all buoyed by a sense of hope and the possibility of victory. A couple of weeks later when we lost the New Hampshire primary, I feared that those folks would stay at home, potentially demoralized and deflated. But when our offices opened up the morning after the primary, we saw more volunteers come in to contribute than we did the day after Iowa. OFA volunteers proved then as they have again this week that they are resilient, that they do not back down from defeat or disappointment, and that they will stand up and keep pushing–no matter what the odds.
OFA supporters know that we must learn from our past–both our successes and failures–so we can strengthen ourselves moving forward. That is why we are taking this time to undergo an extensive and inclusive debrief process with our volunteers, staff, and supporters. Shortly after Election Day, we asked our online and offline supporters to fill out a detailed web survey. In addition, our organizers have held thousands of one-on-one meetings throughout the country since November 2, meeting with our top volunteers to debrief our Vote 2010 campaign. We’ve also held a series of conference calls and forums for discussion, including hundreds of “house meetings” and local neighborhood team gatherings hosted by OFA organizers nationwide. At the same time, our data and targeting operation is sifting through the information culled and analyzing what worked–and what didn’t.
This process closely mirrors what we did in 2008 after the presidential election, when we joined with our volunteers and asked them what they wanted to do with the organization we’d built. It is this grassroots spirit that led this movement to where we are today, and it is this same bottom-up approach that will continue to guide OFA. The results of the debrief process this year have shown us that OFA volunteers are already looking forward and ready to continue supporting President Obama’s agenda–especially around creating jobs and economic growth. Our volunteers overwhelmingly want to continue supporting the President’s legislative efforts, getting involved in local issues, and, importantly, investing in OFA’s training program to get better at what they do.
Just last week, seven OFA volunteers representing their colleagues from around the country came to Washington, DC to meet President Obama and share with him the results of the survey and their debrief process. The volunteers ranged from Rolando Vasquez, a recent college graduate in California, to Jeanell Holmes, a Hurricane Katrina survivor and New Orleans native, to Lenda Sherrell, an organizer since the Presidential primaries of 2008. All seven volunteers epitomized the very best of OFA. Each of them has sacrificed a great deal to take on volunteer leadership roles in their own communities–and each of them is a smart, talented organizer with a critical mind and a compassionate heart.
During the meeting, the volunteers had a candid and open conversation with the President. All seven discussed their work fighting for the historic health care bill, and the group described some of the concerns OFA volunteers have faced in these challenging times. They shared some of their moments of pride and accomplishment–with Betsy Daniel sharing stories about working with Senator Michael Bennet’s successful campaign in Colorado–and they also shared their frustrations and challenges–with Alan Howard recalling some of the tough Congressional elections lost in New York. Throughout the meeting, the President listened, asked questions, and acknowledged some of the changes we all need to make moving into 2011.
Following up on this latest debrief process for OFA, there’s no question we have more work to do–both for this movement and for this nation. But what’s clear from the efforts of OFA supporters this past month is that they remain committed to growing and strengthening this organization–and that their work can make a serious and lasting difference.
This is the passion and resolve that carried us through tough times in the past. It’s this same sense of determination that will carry us through future fights and more historic improvements for our families and our communities–in the new year and beyond.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

‘Tis the time of the year to reflect and project. I’m going to take my cue from the most famous management theorist of all time, Peter Drucker, who lived to the ripe old age of 95. This leadership guru incorporated two practices into his professional and personal life that I’ve decided to adopt in the new year.
First off, Drucker made it a practice of spending two weeks every year reviewing his work, a habit he picked up from his Editor-in-Chief when he was working for a newspaper in Europe. He would set aside this time to “review my work during the preceding year, beginning with the things I did well but could or should have done better, down to the things I did poorly and the things I should have done but did not do.” Simple idea, yet few of us practice this kind of self-reflection. I’m off to the beach for the next few days and, while I won’t spend two weeks on this, I will spend a few days doing an inventory of what I learned this year and how I can apply it in 2011.
Peter Drucker’s other practice — to adopt a new subject, completely unrelated to his work life, to study and master over the course of three years — is an unadulterated form of curiosity. When I spent some time with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the author of the landmark book Flow this summer, he told me that the most important trait for 21st Century innovation isn’t creativity, but instead it’s curiosity. Curiosity — that blessed alchemy of wonder and awe — is a quality that we all had as a child and yet, with time, most of us found ourselves on a narrower and narrower path.
For more than 60 years, Peter Drucker studied one subject at a time from Japanese art to Civil War history with the intent of mastering the subject. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it helped Mr. Drucker keep a facile mind and a youthful spirit into his mid-90′s. So, starting in 2011, I am going to take one subject per year and devour it — both mentally and experientially. This first year I’m going to tackle the sublime and geological magic of natural hot springs. Why and how were these created? Why do some smell so different than others? What are the health benefits or risks associated with using them? And what’s the history of public bathing? And, as I will do in the future with subjects like Renaissance art or hang gliding, I plan to explore these subjects by literally diving in. So, in 2011, I will visit a different natural hot spring every month of the year. Iceland and Japan, here I come!!
Some of you may think this is silly. How can this be related to business leadership? One of the most sage pieces of advice I ever heard went something like this: “Great managers have great answers. Great leaders have great questions.” At the heart of great leadership is a curious mind, heart, and spirit. Today, business serendipity and profound innovation will come from seeing the metaphors and natural laws in one part of life and applying them elsewhere with a vision that less curious minds would never have imagined. See you in the spring.

Follow Chip Conley on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/ChipConley

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Net neutrality is a concept that the tech industry rallies around, but it is hypocrisy.
The idea is that the transport layer, operated by telephone companies and cable companies, must transport all bits across their lines at the same rate and cost. Nice idea, but it’s hypocritical to demand that of their vendors when they don’t provide it to their users. For some reason they are never called on this hypocrisy by the tech press.
At the PDFleaks conference in NYC last Saturday I said that after Amazon booted WikiLeaks from EC2 that signaled very clearly that there is no such thing as net neutrality. Here’s a service provider, very analogous to Comcast and Verizon, that decided it wasn’t in its economic interest to carry a user’s bits. It wasn’t just about the level or cost of the service, they cut them off totally. Without adequate explanation of why. Saying they were doing something illegal is no explanation at all. That’s not for Amazon to decide, that’s for the courts. Due process is required to prove that something illegal is happening. And many legal experts believe that there’s nothing illegal about WikiLeaks.
Something like this happened to UserLand in April 2000. We were having serious problems with our ISP, our T1 line was dead for most of a month. When I had connectivity, I was writing about the problems on my blog. I had to, people needed to know why we weren’t on the net. We had our own customers, and they weren’t being very patient, nor should they have been. I don’t think the supplier ever understood that we had customers, even though we said it repeatedly.
Out of the blue, without any explanation, they terminated our service. That cost us hugely, not only in human time, but in startup fees with a new ISP. We were a small, thinly financed company, so it really hurt.
But that’s reality. Most of us live with anything-but net neutrality. When the tech industry asks us to stand up for them, they’re really pushing the chutzpah.
Read your user-agreements carefully. Most of them give the vendor the right to terminate your service at will without any appeal possible. That’s not net neutral. Not even close.
This post originally appeared at Scripting News.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

The venerables in the U.S. Senate finally caught on to what everyone knew long ago.
Gay men and lesbians serve in the military. They always have. After needlessly discharging almost 14,000 men and women, humiliating them and outing them, the U.S. Senate is finally on the verge of repealing ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.’
Allan Brub wrote about gay soldiers during World War II in his book Coming Out Under Fire. It was sparked by a box of letters he found from a dozen gay G.I.s who met in Missouri and wrote to each other from different bases all over the country. It moved Brub, who said that although the army barred gays from 1942, they still enlisted.
For many small-town gay men and women, the army was their chance to get away, to not only serve their country but also, ironically, to meet other gay people.
It was like going to the seminary but with push-ups.
Now that ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ is on the verge of repeal, gay people won’t have to hide their sexuality.
But can they kiss?
The question now is not whether the military can tolerate gay people but whether it can tolerate gay relationships. America has long moved into a realm of gay tolerance. Television did that to us thanks to Ellen and Will and Grace.
But while we are okay with the gay best friend, the gay neighbor, there is still tremendous discomfort around the gay couple. Heterosexuals have families. Gays have sex. That is still the overriding discomfort zone for Americans when it comes to homosexuality.
It’s not just Americans of course. When the High Court in New Delhi overturned India’s sodomy laws, several people filed motions to reinstate the laws. One of the litigants said if the sodomy law was repealed, it could lead to a national security problem. Apparently soldiers in the Indian army, stationed in the freezing glaciers near the contested borders with Pakistan in the Himalayas, would be more interested in keeping each other warm than in guarding the borders. Perhaps that is the “great damage” John McCain is worried about.
Gay, it seems, is just another three-letter word for sex. That’s perhaps one of the reasons why Prop 8, the ban on same-sex marriage, eventually passed in California and Prop 1 passed in Maine. In her new book Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, Chinese American novelist Yiyun Li says the title refers to a Chinese phrase for a made-for-each other couple, the beautiful girl and the handsome boy. In the fight for same-sex marriage, advocates have tried to find their Gold Boy-Gold Boy and Emerald Girl-Emerald Girl couples – long committed relationships, solid jobs, excellent references. When you see them you shouldn’t think sex, you should think green bean casserole.
For the army the great challenge will be not for the lesbian and gay men and women who serve. It will be for the soldiers who serve with them.
Forget the digs about dropping the soap in the shower. Can they deal with the girlfriends and boyfriends? Robin Chaurasiya was recently outed and discharged because a fellow service member, a man she had briefly dated, got jealous when he found out she was dating a woman.
Barney Frank had it right when he told Maureen Dowd that it would be one thing to have an openly gay presidential candidate. It would be another to have that candidate kiss his partner after winning the New Hampshire primary. Will America avert its eyes then?
‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ was in many ways not just about the military. It was really America’s own evolving relationship with homosexuality. We are fine with it as long as you don’t display it, don’t talk about it at dinner. At least we are not lobotomizing it or electro-shocking it. The repeal of ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ is going to force these issues out into the open.
The unspoked fear is that in this new army, the Lawrence Oliviers will keep asking the Tony Curtises whether they prefer snails or oysters. The Greeks and Romans obviously knew a thing or two about that. Achilles’ real heel was his love for Patroclus. It didn’t make Achilles any less a warrior. The Army is probably not worried about gay men shooting straight. The hidden worry is that the U.S. Army could become the new Troy, and in this version. Achilles and Patroclus have their pictures all over Facebook.
The real test will be when the next war ends, if the iconic photograph will be of an American marine kissing another marine in Times Square. Two men. Or two women. And both in uniform.
But as we look at that image, we’ll have to remember that 14,000 men and women paid with their careers for that kiss.

Follow Sandip Roy on Twitter:
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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

This was a a three-hour telecast, so we have a lot to discuss. Buckle up for safety.
Dan: “This tribe might think I’m a weak link, but I don’t consider myself a weak link.” He also thinks he’s entertaining, that acting like one of the Sopranos is amusing, thought that $1600 alligator shoes would be practical jungle footware (I assume because they come from the jungle originally), and his “personal hero” is Ronald Reagan. In short, he can’t get anything right.
Fabio understands proper Survivor accessorizing: “I’m not very comfortable going to Tribal Council without a necklace right now,” he said. I’m the same way, and I also require earrings and a turban.
Sash is proposing marriage to each of the remaining players. That would work, if this were Survivor: Utah.
Immunity Challenge #1: Not a good visual start. It involved running out, or in Dan’s case, hobbling out, to answer double-choice trivia questions about Nicaragua. (Made-up example: “Nicaragua is often mistaken for what other country at dinner parties? A. France. B. Hell.”) The players return to base with a bag of puzzle pieces assigned to the answer they’ve chosen. If they were right, they have useful pieces. It they were wrong, they have blank pieces and must go back. They have to get through three questions. First person to assemble their jigsaw puzzle wins. So we have puzzle-assembling, my pet peeve in challenges because it’s so dull to watch, and a sort-of quiz, which could be interesting, except they read the questions not speak them, so it’s kind of a muddle of a contest. One saving grace: it was pouring rain. That’s always a plus at a challenge for the viewers.
Not much physically, just a bit of running back and forth. If Dan knows more about Nicaragua than the others, and can assemble jigsaw puzzles quickly, he could win this challenge.
Dan will lose the challenge.
The first question was “What is the country on Nicaragua’s northern border?” My answer, Jurassic Park, was wrong, but they all knew it was Honduras. Well duh. That would have been my second answer, or at worst, my third.
The second question was “The east coast of Nicaragua is also known as the…?” My answer, EuroDisney, wasn’t an option. The right answer was a Harrison Ford movie. Well, Harrison Ford is always the right answer for me!
Fabio, who desperately needs to win this competition, took the bag for “Star Wars: Episode II: The Empire Strikes Back, but the answer was The Mosquito Coast. (Right answer. Good movie. A win-win.)
Question three was: “In the early 16th Century, these people claimed Nicaragua for Spain?” I was pretty sure the answer was “The Mouseketeers.” Annette was always claiming stuff for Spain, which was odd, given her heritage was Italian.
By now, with Chase, Sash and Holly all working on their puzzles, and Fabio with one question left to go (Which was “Your name is ___?” He kept screwing up and answering: “Jud.”), Jeff had given up even announcing where Dan was, though he was almost to the first question.
All season long you (and, every once in a long while, but rarely I’m sure, me as well) have mocked Fabio for being an idiot, but bear in mind, on that third question, he knew the answer was “Conquistadores,” and not “Matadors.” I think Chase flipped a coin.
In an amazing come-from-behind burst (Little Dougie’s favorite kind), Fabio beat Sash and won Immunity. Chase, who had all his puzzle pieces back ages ago, still had a pile of meaningless pieces, as actually figuring out how to assemble the show’s logo escaped his actually-far-dumber-than-Fabio’s brain. That Chase had dropped a piece in the mud and never noticed, didn’t help his game any either.
Dan lost.
The four players who were all planning to vote Fabio out applauded and cheered through gritted teeth, their fury gleaming through their false bonhomie. (I believe this is the first time I have ever used the word “bonhomie” in anything I have ever written.)
Holly’s snap pick to replace Fabio as victim: Dan. Well it’s about friggin’ time! His longevity in this game is an insult to all the truly fine players who have played, and usually lost, this grueling game, yet this is the first time someone has proposed voting him out. Holly should be remembering those $1600 shoes she destroyed weeks ago. She should be singing:
“These [sixteen-hundred dollar alligator shoes] were [caught, tortured, murdered, skinned, cobbled together into a vanity-bauble, overpriced into obscenity, and sold to one of the self-adoring overly-entitled] for walking,
And that’s just what they’ll do,
And one of these days these [sixteen-hundred dollar alligator shoes],
Are going to walk all over you.”
I think Fabio might be wise to vote with Holly, Chase, and Sash against Dan, since his continued presence there offends me. But Fabio is thinking for himself. When did he start doing that? Anyway, Fabio wants to enlist Chase and Sash in voting out Holly. I am fine with Holly going, but she’s Chase’s last remaining Mommy Figure, and without her there, he’d probably cry a lot, and not eat vegetables. (On the other hand, this might save Dan’s life, as he is the biggest vegetable out there.)
Chase feels Dan is more of a threat than Holly. Oh please, Dan is less of a threat than Ghengis Kahn, who has been dead for centuries! “Nobody’s mad at Dan,” said Chase. Well no one respects him either. If ever there was someone who doesn’t deserve to win Survivor, it’s Dan. Besides, he has a Ferrari and wears $1600 shoes, as he loves to remind folks. He doesn’t need the money.
Dan owns a business, if not several. He has a lot of money. We are down to the Final Five. Since Tribal Council last night, he’s been in the company of only four other people. When Fabio tried to talk strategy with him, Dan asked this question: “How many votes do we need?” He can’t count to three? He and Fabio count as two people, though they’re giving short weight if you ask me; they need one more vote. Yes, I can see how Dan could lose count before getting all the way up to “One.”
Dan made his case to Fabio and Sash for voting out Holly. His reason was: she’s a hard-working mom from a little farm who needs the money. They should keep Dan because he’s already rich. He wasn’t lying when he said Ronald Reagan was his personal hero. That’s Reagan’s “Screw the poor, give everything to the rich” philosophy in its purest form. What Dan forgets is that, if Holly is ever going to pay him the $1600 she owes him, she’ll have to win the million. If Dan wins the million, he’ll lose $1600! That should be able to scare off a man who can’t count all the way to one.
Tribal Council: It’s always fun to see the new jury member all cleaned up and glamorous again, but Jane, or Madame DeFarge, doesn’t clean up well. She’s just as scary after her annual bath as before, though her hair looked better.
Dan explained that his whole strategy from Day One was banking on his own unpopularity: Who’d vote for me? I’m a boring, annoying old gasbag who’s been a dead weight in every challenge. No one can stand the sight of me, and I can buy and sell all of you. Keep me around. This strategy, effective as far as it goes, strikes me as not having a very winning endgame.
When Holly said she feared the four guys would vote her out, Jeff asked her why that would be a good idea, essentially asking her to make the case against herself. I believe the Fifth Amendment would protect her from answering that question, except she’s in Nicaragua, outside the Constitution’s protections, much like all of America under George W. Bush.
Holly said Dan wanted her out to have an all-guys Final Four. Since this was something that was only real in Holly’s active imagination, Dan was a bit shocked. But this has been a pattern in Holly’s “thinking” since Day One also. She invents stuff in her head, and then, since she thought of it, she decides it is true, then later is surprised because her fantasies weren’t what was real. She’d make a good priest.
Chase said: “My mind’s always turning.” I assume in circles, because it doesn’t produce much.
Asked to make a case against Dan, she asked if he’d been aggressive, talked to people, though I fail to see what that has to do with it. The case against Dan is simple: he doesn’t deserve to be there; he’s never won, or really even tried to win, anything, and he’s rolling in money. You want to lose the money to a rich man, they way America did last week, when the Bush tax cuts for the rich got extended?
Useless Dan was – finally – voted out! It was unanimous, with Fabio calling him “Uncle Dan” on his ballot. Ew. More like Uncle Fester.
Dan’s exit speech showed his usual matchless class. He called Holly “a crook” for stealing his shoes, adding: “They ought to cut your damn hands off.” Dan’s Iranian? I think that’s a trifle over-harsh, even for Nicaragua. He should make that suggestion to Kelly One-Leg. Of course, if they cut Holly’s damn hands off, and then she still makes the finals, NaOanka, or as we know her, Beelzebimbo, might physically assault her. You got no hands, fool? I’ll show you, freak! Take that! And then Beelzebimbo would yank off Holly’s prosthetic hands, and use them to bitch-slap her.
Dan’s parting words were: “I wish them the worst, and I can’t wait to cast my vote.” So now Tony Soprano has a mole on the jury. The fix is in.
At this point, as Holly put it: “If Fabio wins [Immunity], we will have to turn on our own, and, um, it’ll be very interesting to see what happens.” Or, to put it another way, if Fabio loses Immunity, it will be very boring and predictable. Fabio, please win Immunity just once more!
March of the Fallen: The obligatory boring ritual whereby we revisit the torches of the fallen players, and collect “shields” from them to burn. We have to revisit names we were glad to lose, names we were sorry to lose, and who-the-hell-are-you-guys? names kicked off early on.
Wendy Jo: Who? I don’t remember her. Let me look in my files. Oh yes! The scatterbrained, chatterbox goat-herder – yes, goat-herder – who made an alliance on Day One with Holly, and then talked so much and so incessantly, that she talked herself right off the show at the first Tribal council. I wrote of her in episode one:
Wendy is one of those people who never says anything in two words that can be oversaid with 50 words… Survivor attracts Type-A personalities, and people who think they’re like that, but aren’t. Meet Wendy: “I have leadership skills.” Sure she does. Here she explained it a bit more in her CBS online bio: “I’m also good at strawteegee- ah – strategy, and thinking, and against the other team and such…” She can’t even organize a sentence, but she thinks she’s good at strawteegee.
At Wendy’s torch, Holly said: “Whenever you looked at her, she glowed.” Oh my God; she was radioactive! Was her touch deadly, like Boris Karloff’s touch was in The Invisible Ray?
Shannon: Shannon I remember vividly! The most-gorgeous man in the show this season, married since birth, 40 or 50 kids, hates all women, and also homophobic. Basically, anyone who might want to have sex with him, he has total contempt for. He has a point.
Superbowl Guy: the big name celebrity, famous – apparently – for his Extenz commercials in which he brags about his giant, chemically-enhanced schvanstukker, and also for coaching some sport. CBS was really counting on him this season. He lasted three episodes.
Holly brought up at Superbowl Guy’s torch how, if it weren’t for his peptalk to her, she’d have quit the game way back in the first week. The players are supposed to say nice things about the “fallen”. It’s my job to say mean things about them. Why is she reminiscing over the worst thing he did while he was there?
Jimmy T: Oh good gracious, that windbag: a fisherman of 48 who looked 20 years older than he was, deeply in love with the sound of his own voice, always with a worthless opinion on everything, always whining that he wasn’t being allowed to lead. He kvetched and annoyed his way out of the game, voted out because no one could stand to be around him a moment longer. Remember, they could have voted out Dan then, but voted out Jimmy T instead, for being horrible company.
In Jimmy T’s flashbacks, we once more had to endure numerous shots of him shirtless and braless. He said in voice-over: “I’m certainly humbled.” Remembering what a gasbag he was, I’d prefer it if he were mumbled.
Tyrone: the middle-aged, hunky black fire captain, whose inability to stop ordering people about like he was their captain too got him ousted. Great pecs, not stupid, often right about stuff, but zero people skills. I wish they’d had a camera on him in his home when he got to see on TV how the tribe’s ignoring his fire safety advice got their camp burned down. He must have roared with laughter.
Kelly One-Leg: There’s no way around how amazing her performances in the challenges were. She did inspiringly well. Compared to Dan, with two legs, she made 10 of him. Plus, she stood up (as best anyone could) to being physically and verbally assaulted by Beelzebimbo, for the crime of existing. Beelzebimbo is a natural playground bully (No wonder she became a PE coach, a perfect job for semi-bright bullies), and playground bullies are, of course, cowards who always pick on the weakest and most-vulnerable. She took one look at Kelly One-Leg and recognized her natural prey, and seemed puzzled that no one else could see that this was The Natural Order of Things, and support her in it.
Yve: Who? Where are my notes again? What did I say in the first show? Nothing. She spoke one sentence at Tribal Council. Well, Yve was a woman, and she was on the show, and then she got voted off. Let’s move on.
Jill: Her I remember, the right-wing Republican, devoutly religious, Christian, ER doctor, who only looked like a hyper-butch Lesbian. She could have been a strong player, but she developed this very passive attitude of “Whatever you want, Marty” for her strategy, and it was death.
Alina: Oh yes. The other pretty girl on the jury. She – ah – she – she was on the show.
Marty: Marty is a successful businessman, and clearly thought he’d be able to manipulate everyone to his advantage. While he was on the original Antiques Tribe, he was actually fairly good at it, but once the Fetuses were tossed into the mix, he was in trouble. It wasn’t just that he couldn’t read them, or that he thought they would just accept his authority as a slightly (in his mind) older man. It was that he saw himself as “one of the guys” with Sash and Chase and all the other men 2 to 3 decades younger than him, who all saw him as just another old man to ignore and trick. And he gave Sash his Immunity Idol. Now he’s on the jury, and Sash is still playing.
Easy on the eyes though. Marty and Tyrone were the only two men on The Antiques Tribe to look good shirtless.
Brenda: A beauty queen used to getting her way by manipulating men, but unlike a lot of beautiful manipulators, Brenda was smart, allowing her to recognize Chase as a besotted idiot to be toyed with for her own purposes, while realizing Sash was smarter than Chase, and more openly conspiring with him, though still remaining the one in charge, until her little male-harem turned on her owing to Holly’s Manipulative-Mom wiles trumping her influence over these Oedipal wrecks, and found herself voted out.
Quitter Beelzebimbo: This walk is allegedly to honor the honorably fallen, not to honor the disgraced quitters. It’s bad enough that this foul monster, who besmirched this season and then fled in cowardice, showing that when the going gets tough, the selfish shrews head for the hills, is allowed on the jury. Her torch should not be allowed on this walk either.
The editors had a little fun with Beelzebimbo’s retrospective comments over her montage. We heard her say: “I always had a smile…” (So what?) while we looked at a shot of her crying (in self-pity of course, the only emotion that can make her cry.), and we heard her say “I was friendly…” over shots of her assaulting and beating up Kelly One-Leg. I see; it was not assault; it was just being overly-friendly.
Beelzebimbo, who is not at all ashamed of her game, continued. “I’m not trying to toot my own horn,” she said, tooting her own horn because no one else on earth would toot it for her, “But I was literally the shmartest [sic] player in the game, hands down, and the craziest.” She was literally not the smartest player in the game. But I’ll hand her this, she was indeed, literally, the craziest. Really. She’s insane. She needs to be confined in a rubber room. Literally. Where’s Nurse Ratchet when you need her?
Quitter Kelly Never-Here: In her entire time on the show, she spoke a total of maybe 50 words on the air, of which, two were interesting: “I’m quitting.” Not a horrible human being like Beelzebimbo, just young, young, young. Her body is a mere 20 years, and her brain is still that of an unborn fetus. She is untroubled by thought, but she responds to color and movement. She quit. Ignore her.
But Kelly’s little speech showed she does excel at something: Self-Delusion. At the Self-Delusion Olympics, she could even compete with Beelzebimbo: “My reputation is not a quitter…” Actually, after you quit Survivor on national TV; your reputation is: a brainless quitter.
“…And people back home, they all know that…” You quit on CBS primetime, on a show that consistently scores in the Top 20, and was, according to the current issue of Entertainment Weekly, the ninth highest-rated show of 2010 (scoring just slightly below Survivor: Heroes vs Villains, which was the eighth highest-rated show of 2010.), which means a bit over 13 million people know you only as a quitter. That’s more people than you’ve met personally in your whole life, so you reputation is overwhelmingly that of a quitter.
“…So it’s going to be hard for me to be seen walking away from something, because that’s not who I am.” Hey Kelly, here’s a headline for you: that’s who you are. You’re a quitter and you quit. Honestly, where do these two brainless women get the idea that you can quit, but if you just say you’re not a quitter, then you’re not a quitter? A quitter is one who quits. You both quit. You’re both quitters.
I suspect that at the reunion show, Kelly and Beelzebimbo will announce that they will not rest until “the real quitters” are found and brought to justice.
As Johnny Cochran never said: “If the stolen socks fit her, she must be a quitter.”
Benry: Benry modestly told us he would have won the Immunity Challenges that Fabio has won, “unless there were some puzzles involved.” Good thing you’re out then, Benry, because this most-recent Immunity Challenge depended on a puzzle, which Fabio, though he was the next-to-last person to begin working on the puzzle, nonetheless solved first. Think how embarrassed you’d have been. Now go back to talking drunken teenage girls into flashing their breasts on camera for Girls Gone Wild.
Madame DeFarge: Chase’s Carolina-and-Mom obsession are still in play with Madame DeFarge, as he said that she deserved to win the show he voted to remove her from. If you win the money, Chase, will you give it to her? Come to think of it, he’s such an idiot, and so vulnerable to mother-figures, she probably could talk him into giving her the money. For that matter, so could Sash.
Useless, Twice-Shoeless, Dan:> “Dan the Man,” the boys said in unison. So that’s what that annoying, useless troll was? A man? Who knew? He doesn’t need the money, and he’s not getting it either. How can we miss him if he won’t go away.
Dan: “I think I’m gonna be a lot less spoiled when I get back to New York.” I don’t. But somewhere in Brooklyn, his hot son Matt is waiting to renew their interrupted make-out session from the last episode. Now there’s a boy who really wants into the will.
Final Immunity Challenge: This is it. The final challenge. It was a simple one, and not an endurance challenge either. They had to stack coins in a pile on the end of a sword’s hilt which they are holding up, until their stack collapses and they’re eliminated. It was like a combination of the game Jenga and a variety act on the old Ed Sullivan Show. A person doing well at this challenge might not just win a million dollars, he might also get a job at Cirque Du Soleil.
The coins weren’t flat or even, so they could make stacks lean in crazy directions. This was a very difficult challenge, requiring intense concentration, and steady hands. I wouldn’t have lasted five seconds. It also makes for tense watching, so unlike puzzles, it makes for good TV.
Plus there was a close-up of Chase’s left nipple, I mean of Chase’s coin stack that happened to require filling a quarter of my screen with a very close up shot of Chase’s left nipple. I know because the shot is freeze-framed on my TV screen right this second, as I dictate this paragraph to Little Dougie. He types; I woman the remote control. I just happened to freeze on this image. Just happened to on my third attempt. (I probably could have gotten it on the first try, except the shot was immediately preceded by a similar close up of one of Sash’s nipples, and it’s hard to switch from “Fast-Forward” to “Pause” that quickly.)
Now Fabio must win this challenge to have any hope of staying in the game, and for me to have any hope that a person I can root for might win. Yet, thanks to lumpy coins, his stack is leaning precariously. I’ve seldom felt such intense suspense before, outside of competitive wine-tasting.
Holly’s stack fell first. So much for Mom keeping a balanced budget. (Go Fabio.)
Chase went second. I expected him to go out first. Every time Jeff would say so-and-so was leaning or losing it, he would take his eyes off his stack to steal a glance at his competition. You can’t win this challenge with that sort of lack of concentration.
So now it was down to just Sash or Fabio. Go Fabio!
You know, in extreme close-up, Fabio’s pecs are not hairless, but have a fine, soft, very downy sweet hair covering his — What Dougie? Oh. Sorry. I got distracted. Yes, who will win?
Fabio’s stack was way off-center. It was getting wobblier and wobblier. Fabio was doomed! Fabio was .. was …
The Winner of Final Immunity! Fabio will face the jury! Is there anyone left who could beat him?
I’ve been making fun of the poorly-toilet-trained surfer boy all season long, but facts are facts. His three-challenge run when the chips were very definitely down was amazing and impressive, and will be remembered in the Survivor annals. He absolutely deserves to win this game all the way. Were I on that jury, my vote for Fabio would be locked up, and something “unfortunate” might have “accidentally” happened to Beelzebimbo back at the hotel, while I had an airtight alibi.
Fabio, in ecstasy back at camp, just sat down to watch the others maneuver and wheedle to not be the last person voted out. He had no intention of participating, just watching and enjoying the spectacle. Me too.
Sash thought he had a deal in place with Fabio to take him to Final Three, identical to the deals he has with Chase, and Holly. But Fabio refused to commit, and just smiled like a Cheshire cat, and made ever-more-non-committal remarks as Sash tried to work him for his thoughts or his vote. The Great Sash can not believe that this stupid little surfer trash could outplay him merely by doing what Sash seldom ever did, win challenges. Who is he? No one! Who am I? Sash the Merciless!
Sash decided to scape Chase’s goat, which is fine by me. He ran down the list of potential jury votes for Chase. Actually, much as Sash makes my skin crawl, he’s probably a better choice to take to the end than Chase. Holly may pull in a few votes also, like Chase’s if they put him on the jury.
Sash claimed he was not going to vote Fabio out had he lost Immunity. Fabio’s intelligence has seemed to waver greatly throughout the season, but he’s never seemed dumb enough to believe that, nor to believe Sash’s insane declaration of love: “I feel like you’re my best friend in the game.” Oh puh-leaze!
And Fabio sat, grinning like Buddha, replying with monosyllabic cools, clearly not buying one word of Sash’s lies, but noticing that he was being lied to. Fabio could teach Evil Russell how to play this game.
Chase wandered by, so that his and Fabio’s nipples could have a last chat together. Chase wanted to know what Sash had been talking to him about, and Fabio took a wildly new approach; he told him the truth, that Sash had been trying to paint a target on him.
I was reminded of the scene in From Russia With Love, when Blofeld explains to Rosa Klebb (Played adequately by Lotte Lenya. I was up for the role at the time, but they went with Lotte because they said my Rosa Klebb was “too scary.” Nor were my chances at the role improved when, after I snuck into Sean Connery’s dressing trailer naked, and Sir Sean ran from the trailer screaming something about a giant squid in his bed.), how SPECTRE’s technique is to turn their opponents on each other, then watch them battle each other to exhaustion, and then just stroll in and take the prizes themselves. This was Fabio, watching like a hot hairy Blofeld, stroking his kitty, and watching everyone else turn on each other, as the last alliances split asunder. My gracious, Fabio is a Diabolical Mini-Mind!
Chase is amazed to discover, on Day 38 out of 39, that Sash will do whatever he thinks he needs to to win. I guess up till now, Chase thought Sash’s goal was: “Well, I’d like to win, if that’s not inconveniencing anyone. Oh you want to win, Chase? Well, then I’ll defer to you. You go, win, live. I belong dead.”
Fabio’s powers of description are so accurate, he should write this column: “It’s almost like, if I just walked into a kitchen, turned the lights on, and all these little cockroaches are trying to scramble to get out of the way, and to throw someone else under the bus.” I’ve seen the occasional insect in my home – I used to have an agent, after all – but never have I turned on a kitchen light only to see cockroaches try to throw someone under a bus. How big are the cockroaches in Fabio’s beach pad anyway?
Chase tried honesty back, by confessing to Fabio that, had Fabio lost immunity, he’d have been toast. This was Chase’s first smart move in the whole game, as Fabio appreciated the no-bull approach over Sash’s continuing to insult his intelligence with transparent lies. (Okay, I’ve been insulting his intelligence all season also, but I repent. Fabio rules Survivor 21: Infants vs Senior Citizens!)
Tribal Council #2: Fabio is sailing on a joyous high. He knows the jury are all seeing him wearing that necklace a third consecutive time. Whoever wears the same thing three times? Darlings, If I wear the same thing even twice, I feel so common.
Sash, after sort of admitting that he’s had alliances at one time or another with pretty much everyone, even players on previous seasons, and two on next season, and one with “The Brigade” on Big Brother 12, said to Fabio: “I think, over the past few days, I’ve been more committal to you than Chase has.” Committal? Chase has been more honest with Fabio, but “over the past few days,” just since Fabio began winning every Immunity Challenge, Sash been more “committal” to him, whatever the hell “committal” means. If Fabio believes a word of this bilge, I’ll be attending his committal.
Sash was given one last pitch to Fabio. It was priceless desperation: “Fabio, we’ve been in this since the beginning…” Weren’t all 20 of them “in this from the beginning”? Which of the players came late? Was someone not added until episode 3?
Sash made himself into such a clear liar, and outraged and amused the entire jury to such a level of contempt, that he saved himself. Holly, the last woman and the last Antique, was voted out. In the Infants vs Senior Citizens conflict, the Infants won. Somehow, a group of middle-aged-to-elderly geezers had been unable to defeat a tribe of fit twentysomethings in brutal physical challenges under grueling living conditions. Who ever saw that coming?
Back at camp, Chase and Sash both tried desperately to pretend that this was the Final Three they’s always really wanted. Fabio, the only one of the three who had actually wanted it now knew what a load of bull that was. He’d undoubtedly arrived at Tribal Council already knowing that Holly had the biggest number of likely votes on the jury, and already decided to vote her out, but he still put Chase and Sash through the wringer of having their machinations exposed to the jury for later. Sash and Chase wanted to party. Fabio was working on his summation.
Sash feels that only he of the three of them “deserves” to be in the finals. There simply is no logical argument that can be made to say that Fabio does not deserve to be right where he is.
Sash: “I really do feel I played the best strategic game…” except for little things like your whole strategy blowing up in your face, your being exposed as engaged in duplicity with everyone, and the small problem that everyone now views you with scorn and contempt.
And whose strategy has paid off best? Fabio’s. Holding back, being thought the clown, and a lesser threat at challenges, until the chips were down, and then going into an overdrive no one had ever suspected of him, all without pissing off anyone but Beelzebimbo. It’s a brilliant combination of mental strategy, social game, and physical prowess. Sash should be embarrassed to be seen beside him.
Sash called Fabio and Chase: “my two wingmen,” utterly unconscious of how insulting that was. In Sash’s mind, the world always turns around him, but Fabio is well aware that Sash is off-center, and it’s cracking up the increasingly deliriously happy boy.
There is of course, no game to be played between the last two Tribal Councils, so it’s always a waste of time, as the last players finally get to fill their bellies.
But Chase is still trying to work the game. He’s trying to pump Fabio up into a state of overconfidence so grand that he somehow sinks himself at Final Tribal Council. This relentlessly stupid and blundering competitor is trying to psyche out the young man who had everyone underestimate him right into Final Council. However smart or not-smart Fabio is, one thing is clear, he’s Professor Stephen Hawking next to Chase.
Sash’s problem will be to deal with the fact that he either betrayed, lied to, backstabbed, or was just upfront hostile to everyone on the jury. Chase’s problem is that he betrayed almost everyone on the jury. Fabio’s problem will be finding nice tax shelters.
Before leaving for Final Tribal Council, there was the final ritual of burning their camp down. Been there. Done that. Good thing Tyrone didn’t make it to the end; he’d have been a total pain about the arson.
Chase: “I didn’t come out here playin’ for second place.” He went all the way to Nicaragua for third place? Well, he may have to put that dream behind him, because I think Sash has a lock on third place.
Final Tribal Council: Holly looked like she’d had facial-rejuvenating work done just in the 23 hours since she was voted out. Were they waiting in her hotel room with emergency Botox?
Beelzebimbo made a face (I mean even worse than her normal face) when Fabio said he’d enjoyed being out there with each and every one of them. Even she knew better than to believe someone could enjoy spending time with her. Fabio’s lie didn’t impress her.
Sash asked the jury to respect his backstabbing of each of them, and going back on their alliances, and to award him the money because of that. Sadly for this line of “reasoning,” Brenda is first up, his closest ally in the game, whom he totally betrayed, sitting there looking at the sky when she expected him to hand her his immunity necklace, that he later used for himself on a night when he got only one vote anyway. It would have saved her. Getting Brenda to forgive that betrayal was going to be difficult.
“I am remorseful,” said Sash, doing himself no favors by adding: “I did have to backstab nine people, but…” Nine people! I’d lost track of Sash’s body count. He may be the first player in Survivor history to come out of Final Tribal Council with a negative number of votes.
I loved Marty’s jury question. He asked each finalist who their pick was for The Dumber-Than-A-Bag-of-Hammers Award for this season. (I won this title in 1947, barely edging out Betty Hutton.)
Chase chose Marty, even though that was against Marty’s rules. Had Chase forgotten that he was trying to win votes?
Holly asked Chase “What do you consider your best strategical move?” Sash uses that a lot too, saying stuff like, “I played the best strategical game.” Okay everyone, the adjectival form of strategy is “strategic,” not “strategical.” You make strategic moves, not strategical moves. You play a strategic game (though not if you are Chase), not a strategical game. And I mean that literally.
Holly asked Fabio: “Do you think winning the last three Immunity Challenges was too little too late?” What? First off, there’s nothing “little” about it. Let’s see Holly try winning three immunities in a row. Oh wait, we did. She lost three in a row. It wasn’t too little, too late. It was a whole lot, just in the nick of time.
Holly: “Sash, did you ever lie to me? Honestly, be honest.” Listen to yourself, woman! What a pointless question. You know, if he says he did (and he said he did), that probably means he didn’t. He works in real estate in New York City. Telling him to “be honest” sets off an automatic lie response. It’s a reflex.
When Madame DeFarge stood up to talk, the questions arose: had she gotten over her bitterness? Had she matured in her emotional responses? Would she act her age?
No, nope, and no way.
Madame DeFarge to Sash: “All I gotta say is someone sure raised you good to be a New York river rat.” Well DeFargie, that would be Sash’s mother. You met her four days ago. Nice woman. Very pale and blond. Now about how you were raised…
She told Sash to go back to his sewers. I don’t think Sash has that vote completely sewn up just yet.
DeFarge told Chase he’d made her time out there: “the funnest event I’ve ever had in my life,” thus simultaneously shaming both her late husband and her high school English teacher, who’s probably dead too.
The few seniors on the jury were determined to give lessons in class and good sportsmanship to their younger vanquishers, especially Sash.
First we had Madame DeFarge’s sewer rat diatribe, delivered while still looking like a vengeful zombie who’s wearing a nice wig.
Then Useless Dan lit into Sash with: “Sash, I think you’re a liar, I think you’re a phoney … I think you’re spineless, and I hate that smile, and I think if I was you, I’d go to the doctor tomorrow and get that eyes fixed.” Wow! Now that is a low, classless blow. Yes, Sash has a wandering eye, he looks a bit wall-eyed, and he can’t look you in the eyes with both eyes at once. Go back over the 14 columns I’ve written about this season. They’re full of cheap shots and low blows, but you will not find one single joke, or mention, or Sash’s eye problems until now. The idea, Dan, is to make Sash look bad, not you.
Dan told Chase that “Beauty fades, dumb is forever,” which I guess was his way of saying that in 40 years, Chase will look just like Dan. Man, that’s mean.
Dan said nothing to Fabio. People are reading Sash and Chase the riot act, one after the other, but so far that lame “too little, too late” question is the closest anyone’s come to taking a shot at Fabio. I think I know who will be using a solid gold surfboard next summer, once. (A gold surfboard would not be terribly buoyant.)
Why do the quitters get to ask questions? They quit. It’s bad enough they get to vote.
Kelly No-Brain: “You guys did what I couldn’t do.” Get more than 15 seconds of airtime? Speak in complete sentences? Sit up unassisted?
Beelzebimbo called Fabio her: “hippie friend.” Would that be the hippie friend whose apartment you rob while he’s out, to pay your own rent?
Beelzebimbo made Fabio cry. She makes the angels in Heaven weep as well. That’s why its been raining nonstop for the last four days here in Los Angeles, where all these people are for the live reunion show due to start very shortly.
“You gotta dig deep in this game,” advised Beelzebimbo, who had only dug shallow herself. Well, I guess when you are shallow, you can only dig shallow.
Alina said to Fabio that he was a boy, and she didn’t want to give a million dollars to a boy, “I want to give a million dollars to a man.” Anyone in particular? You’re not unattractive. I’m sure you could find a man more cheaply than that.
And what is Fabio supposed to do, pledge to be older? He won individual immunity four times, including thrice consecutively. Alina, he isn’t just a man; he’s the man! He’s more man than you’ll ever get.
Marty declared his love for Fabio as he cast his vote. Have they registered china patterns anywhere? They’ll make a darling couple.
As she voted, Beelzebimbo said to us: “It’s been a pleasure.” I can not return the sentiment.
Alina voted for Chase because she was “so impressed” with him tonight. If she were a man, I’d accuse her of voting from her crotch. Brenda voted for Chase also. That was forgiving of her.
Live Results and Reunion Show: Fabio with a decent haircut! Chase with no hair at all! Sash – ah – Sash was also there.
Voldepussy was in the audience! Damn! We’ve got to get that last Harry Potter movie into theaters, so he can be utterly destroyed, and never reappear on my TV again.
Why is no one shirtless? Oh yes. They’re here in Los Angeles today, like me, and it’s been cold, and pouring rain all day and all night for four days now.
Jeff said winning the million dollars “could be life-changing.” For whom might it not be life changing? Donald Trump? Dick Cheney? Scrooge McDuck?
Jeff, after each vote, would recount the tally: “Two votes Fabio, one vote Chase,” but ignored Sash. I wanted him to say: “Three votes Fabio, two votes Chase, no votes Sash.”
Fabio became the youngest Survivor winner ever, at age 21, by five votes to four. Why did Chase get four votes? Oh, and that would be Sash: zero votes. I feel irrationally happy for Fabio. This is the first time someone I’ve rooted for has won one of these games since I started blogging them. Fabio just proved that not only can you win Survivor without backstabbing or lying, but that can even help you with the jury. (But really, who were all those votes for Chase, besides Brenda and Kelly? I’ll bet Madame DeFarge voted with her statehood instead of her mind, and voted Chase.)
The first of the jury members to hug Fabio were Alina and Brenda, both of whom voted for Chase.
Fabio tried coming out of the Stupidity Closet, but he’s so blunderingly inarticulate, he has a hard time being convincing. Yet his strategy paid off; he’s certainly smarter than Chase, he often seemed a voice of sanity amidst the madness (I remember him at the second Tribal Council, when Shannon’s mouth was digging him the hole he shortly fell into, just saying: “Dude, shut up.” which was excellent advice Shannon ignored.), and he seems a sweet boy, who holds malice towards none.
Chase got to audition his “new single.” It’s country-western music. I won’t be acquiring it.
Superbowl Guy brought along that insufferable gasbag Terry Bradshaw and Jeff gave him airtime to run his boring mouth. Please. Lock Terry in a windowless room somewhere with Jay Leno, and throw away the key.
Holly cleaned up and made-up dropped years from her appearance. She looked 35 at the most. The alligator shoes issue was raised so Holly could make it up to Dan by bringing him what she called “full quilt ostrich boots.” I didn’t know ostriches even wore boots. In the process, she let slip that Dan said he had 20 more pairs of alligator shoes at home. That’s $32,000 just in shoes. I’m sorry; that’s obscene. Good thing his Bush-era tax breaks were extended, so he doesn’t need to cash in his fortune in shoes to pay for his Ferraris. The country is bankrupt, but Dan has 20 pairs of $1600 shoes. Maybe his idol isn’t so much Ronald Reagan as Imelda Marcos.
Jeff was still calling Madame DeFarge “one of this season’s most-liked contestants.” Really? Still? At first, when she seemed a loveable, slightly dotty, old granny-with-grit, she seemed adorable. But as time wore on, and the terrifying, hungry-zombie look took her over, and she bloodied her way through the game, and finally, became a raving, childish spirit of Vengeance and Spite, her former-loveableness became just a distant memory. Didn’t it?
Madame DeFarge complained that on the first day, Tyrone and Marty had “fluffed her off.” Madame DeFarge has probably never worked in pornography (At least I hope not. Ew!), so she is blissfully unaware of what it means “to fluff” in that industry. (It’s a skill I’ve kept my amateur standing in for many years. I’m nationally ranked.) When Jeff asked Marty why he had fluffed her off, Marty clearly did know the funny meaning of fluffing.
Then came Dump-on-Beelzebimbo Time, which I’d been anticipating more than the game results. We had a montage of her horrible actions and hideous words. She got a smattering of applause, joined by some boos and jeering. She offered forth the standard: when you’re playing a game for a million dollars, where it’s okay because it’s part of the game, and her judgement was impaired, though she stands by all her actions, and she never thought she’d come across as a villain (that much, at least, is true. She had no idea that people found her appalling behavior appalling. Common Human Decency is utterly foreign to her.), and the absurd: “I did exactly what I needed to do to win.” Hello? The first thing you have to do to win is not quit.
By the way, her last name is “Mixon.” I’m not fooled by one little line added to the first N. I recognize the sort of shambling Evil that in this country has long gone by the dreaded name Nixon.
And when Jeff brought up all the parents who have sensibly pulled their kids from her classes, and demanded her principals fire her (which Beelzebimbo tried to gloss over, by pretending it was only one parent), she hit the Reality Game Excuse word-for-word from the Evil Players Handbook of Excuses: “This is a reality TV show, and it’s a game for a million dollars, and this has nothing to do with my real life. … We shouldn’t be judged with our profession with this game. I think that’s ridiculous.”
I’ve heard this argument again and again, though rarely expressed so ungrammatically, and it’s garbage. This is indeed, Reality TV, and the Reality that gets exposed is who these people really are inside, what comes out as the pressure and the hardship mixes with the greed for a million dollars, to strip away their civilized veneers, and expose the players’ actual characters. Their real self is who they show us. As the Romans sort-of said: “In Survivorus, veritas.”
Fabio was also playing for that million, and except for peeing in the pool, he never ceased to be a gentleman, told no lies, stabbed no backs, assaulted no disabled women, stole no one’s clothes nor food, screamed no insults at other people.
In short, Beelzebimbo showed us her real self inside, and her refusal to take any sort of responsibility for her atrocious behavior underscores that she is, in Reality, a terrible human being, an appalling role model for kids, and so bone-ignorant on such simple, basic teaching matters as familiarity with the English language that I’ve yet to figure out how the stupid cow ever got a teaching credential.
Not that I have any opinions on the matter.
Directly behind Beelzebimbo, Tyrone, a man who runs into burning buildings to save people and property on a daily basis as his profession, sat staring down at her in a cold, unspoken judgement of character. He’d shown his true character under pressure too. He’s a boss at work, and in camp, he became bossy. But he was used to working with brave, dedicated professionals, not selfish crazy cows like her.
Then came justifying her quitting. She angrily complained that it was hard and unpleasant. She thought it would be a fun camping trip from which she would return rich, except she’d never been camping, so she didn’t even really know what that meant. “I didn’t know a rain forest’s going to be a rain forest.” The inability to work out that the term “rain forest” means a forest where it rains a lot not only demonstrates stupidity of an awesomely high level, but also again a level of ignorance that calls her teaching credential into question. Just how many accredited teachers in California don’t know that it rains a lot in a rain forest? We should find out, and fire all of those. Never mind keeping your kids out of her classes because she’s evil; keep your kids out of her classes because she knows less than they do.
Beelzebimbo’s lousy mother, who failed to instill any ethics or an education into her disgusting daughter (and who looks like one really large, scary drag queen, though she doesn’t sound like one), admitted she was somewhat like her daughter. She seemed a bit shell-shocked to be popped up on TV to try to assess and account for her daughter’s rampage of atrocious behavior. Mom then, in Jeff’s words, threw her daughter under a bus, though not literally, unfortunately.
Jeff then announced Beelzebimbo’s and Kelly Brainfree’s legacy: they’ve changed the rules, and from here on in, if you quit, no jury duty, because having those two quitters on the jury incensed the fans all over America.
Evil Russell was there. That explains the smell. Fabio’s win coupled with Russell’s two losses represents a total refutation of all Russell stands for, though he’d make a good team with Beelzebimbo.
The Dash Popularity Contest Winner of $100,000, voted in by the largest margin of votes ever, was Madame DeFarge. I guess she does remain popular. Why? Don’t you find her scary? I do.
Jeff to the misogynistic, homophobic Shannon: “I want to give you a chance to redeem.”
Shannon: “Redeem what?” The conversation should have ended there. The fact that he could even ask that simply reminds us that he’s beyond saving already.
Shannon then launched into defending his calling Sash gay, saying he met Sash’s girlfriend. Jeff could not get him to stop talking, so he could clarify which of his revolting aspects he was actually referring to, and so his homophobia wouldn’t continue besmirching their show the very day after Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was repealed. He wasn’t apologizing for his anti-gay attitudes. He was admitting that Sash isn’t gay, so his “insult” was mistaken, missing the more-basic point that being called gay isn’t an insult; it’s, in Sash’s case, an unearned compliment. (Tom Cruise always misses this point also.) Jeff got disgusted by Shannon, and cut him off, instead asking a question of Wendy, a risky escape, since it’s only a one-hour reunion show.
Boston Rob was there, and Jeff let him talk at some length about the details of the birth of his and Amber’s latest Survivor baby. Why on earth do parents think anyone else on the planet wants to hear their adventures in labor? Parents, next time you’re tempted to discuss delivery room anecdotes you think are just fascinating, don’t. I know they asked you, but they’re just being polite. Believe me, everyone on earth except you finds your delivery room stories boring, and not just a tad revolting. They do think their delivery room anecdotes are deathless though.
No one cares. Have a nice baby, and give it a great life, but shut up with the birth anecdotes. Really. Shut up. Yes, you too. And put those photos and gory birth videos away also. No one wants to see them!
And that’s Survivor 22: Infants vs Senior Citizens, a weak season with second-rate contestants, an incredible villainess, and the triumph of virtue in the end. Survivor 22: Redemption Island, a season with a return-from-the-dead twist, will be back in February, and barring sudden death, I’ll be back chronicling the season for you.
In the meantime, I’ll be back January first or second, with my third annual, irreverent, year-end dead celebrity round-up. This marks my 100th HuffPost column, and the conclusion of two years here. To all my readers, both regular and sporadic, commenters or lurkers, adoring or hostile, thank you for letting me give you a giggle or two. Merry Christmas, Cheery Boxing Day, Joyous Kwanza, and a Happy Arbitrarily-Chosen Point in our Orbit of the Sun. See you in 2011!
Cheers darlings!
To read more of Tallulah Morehead, go to The Morehead, the Merrier, or buy her book, My Lush Life.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

We will look back at 2010 as the year M-commerce arrived. This holiday season, more than half of consumers say they will do some form of shopping on their smartphone or mobile device. But our holiday Retail User Experience Index showed many shoppers are only “tolerating” website performance (load time, availability) on mobile devices.
This confirms our consumer survey findings that 58 percent of shoppers expect mobile websites to load as fast or faster than their desktop counterparts. These are the same consumers who also desire a rich web experience with video, graphics and compelling applications.
M-Commerce: Context is Key
Many are quick to blame the carriers for poor mobile performance, but our data shows that’s too simple an excuse: the differences between the best mobile website performers and the laggards are pretty wide, even on the same wireless network.
So how does an online retailer address the challenges of mobile devices? The answer is context — specifically how and under what circumstances does your mobile audience interact with your website?
Are they bag-totting business travelers who require one-thumb transactions while catching a flight? Is it a shopper at the mall, using her phone for price comparisons or barcode scans? Or a subway rider dealing with spotty connections? And what time of day do they shop and from which geographies? This context was not as important when online retailing was done only on a laptop or desktop computer.
Evolution of Mobile Commerce
To explore this challenge, let’s look at the evolution of retailing on mobile devices. It starts with a desktop-optimized website and the hope that this core destination, in its full glory, will also perform well on a mobile device. Yes, there are still a few of those left.
Step Two is the realization that the smaller screen size requires a distinct layout, so retailers build a mobile-optimized site, which is typically a stripped-down version of their main site, one that recognizes the device and hopefully shifts you to the m-dot version. This is progress, but it still views the device as a limited channel.
Because we now live in a world of apps, at some point a retailer moves on to Step Three of the evolution: a simple app. These are usually just a thin native wrapper which reuses existing browser functions. Nothing fancy, but at least it’s an app.
Step Four is where many retailers are today, as they capitalize on the full capabilities of the mobile device and build apps with native functions and APIs that use the camera, location services (GPS) and other talents of the hardware itself. The goal is to provide a customized device-specific interface.
Then there’s Step Five, where a company decides it must have it all. It revisits Step Three, adding mobile-specific functionality to the website. So it’s no longer about the limitations of mobile or making the site just “fit” the format. Here retailers make certain the browser fully embraces the capabilities of the device, while at the same time offering several dedicated apps, customized for each mobile OS currently available.
So how much does any one retailer need? That’s usually based on what the category leaders and top performers are doing. But more often, the competition is the creator of the app or website providing the most useful, interesting and flawless web experience. Even if they’re not in the retail category, these are the companies driving today’s user expectations.
Ultimately this brings us back to context: how and under what conditions does your audience use their device and which devices are the most important to them? That will drive a retailer’s buildout priorities. But as we’ve seen, this is a complex issue.
Best-in-Breed Mindset
Five years ago retailers did not need to consider mobile devices. Today they have to deal with multiple mobile platforms, a variety of mobile browsers, dedicated apps for each OS, and also address the moving target of mobile carrier performance.
If a retailer sees these challenges as limitations, it will risk falling behind. Viewing the mobile sea change as a series of opportunities is the predominant mindset we’ve seen in best-in-breed retailers.
These leaders also adopt best practices which include benchmarking the competition’s transaction times, so you have a reference point, and also creating an effortless transaction flow. In other words, does it take two steps to complete a transaction or six?
Measuring response times from the end-user perspective is also vital, as much can go wrong between your data center and your customer’s iPhone. So take a “first mile to last mile” monitoring approach for the best results. This is particularly important with mobile, where the best sites and apps are architected to seem impervious to the shortcomings of mobile carriers.
The game is on for mobile device shopping. And unlike the desktop web, the winners have yet to be crowned. The customers are ready to play, and the days of tolerating poor performance “because it’s mobile” are fading fast. Those who embrace the mobile opportunity, offer the most usable features, and provide the fastest, most consistent performance will emerge as the leaders in their category.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

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Paedophile guide author Greaves arrested in Colorado

Immortality is impeccable moral character.
To borrow from Pericles, to famous men and women all the earth is a sepulcher; and their virtues are testified to not only by their epitaphs but by an unwritten imprint of the mind, which more than any monument or obelisk remains with everyone forever.
Henry Kissinger is no immortal. He will fade into obscurity without leaving footprints in the sands of time. At key points in his ego-driven career, he was confronted with a choice between power and moral principle. He chose power, and became a moral dwarf.
Imagine Kissinger conversing with Shakespeare’s equally designing Lady Macbeth. To disarm Macbeth against dishonoring his pledge to murder King Duncan to ascend the Scottish throne, Lady Macbeth scolds, “I have given suck, and know How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me: I would, while it was smiling in my face, Have pluck’d my nipple from the boneless gums, And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn as you Have done to this.”
Kissinger would have cold-bloodedly comforted: “Dashing the baby’s brains out is not a Scottish concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”
That Kissinger is devoid of moral scruple or noble character is confirmed by a recently released Oval Office tape recording his volunteered advice to then President Richard M. Nixon regarding the free emigration of Soviet Jews to Israel to escape persecution: “And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.” None of John Donne’s sentiment, “Each man’s death diminishes me, for I am involved in mankind. Therefore, send not to know For whom the bell tolls, It tolls for thee.”
Mr. Kissinger fled Nazi Germany for the United States on the brink of the Holocaust. If he and his family had been turned away like the hapless Jews on the St. Louis, Kissinger might have perished in a gas chamber. Amazing how quickly power corrupts the soul and dims memory.
President Nixon was notoriously anti-Semitic. He pontificated to his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman: “The Jews are irreligious, atheistic, immoral bunch of bastards… [Washington] is full of Jews” and “most Jews are disloyal…But, Bob, generally speaking you can’t trust the bastards. They turn on you.”
Kissinger had no quarrel with Nixon’s racism. In a 2005 interview on MSNBC, he denied his political benefactor was anti-Semitic, euphemistically characterizing the bigotry as “sort of standard phrases.” But the phrases were indistinguishable from the Blood Libel or the Protocols of the Elders of Zion routinely employed to justify pogroms or the Holocaust.
As President Nixon’s National Security Adviser, Kissinger was complicit in the illegal secret bombing of Cambodia. He insisted that the FBI continue the two-month wiretapping of suspected leakers of the illegal Cambodian misadventure to enable the targets to establish a “pattern of innocence.” Kissinger defended the United States intervention in Chile to overthrow President Salvador Allende with an arrogance more to be marveled at than imitated: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people….”
Mr. Kissinger never quarreled with President Nixon’s chilling creed, “If the President does it, it’s legal,” which probably caused Sir Thomas More to stir in his grave.
Kissinger’s moral emptiness and craving for power would have made him a poor candidate to support Socrates against the Athenian jury, the American Revolution, the abolition of slavery, or the women’s franchise campaign launched at Seneca Falls in 1848. He was inaudible during the heroic Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. He has sneered at Edmund Burke’s admonition: “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”
Kissinger might insist that he is indispensable. But graveyards are filled with indispensable men and women.
True greatness extracts the better angels of our nature. George Washington scorned a crown coveted by Lady Macbeth in favor of a Republic. Abraham Lincoln counseled charity for all and malice towards none. Martin Luther King, Jr. died in advancing a color-blind society. Socrates chose the hemlock over intellectual or moral vassalage.
All Kissinger can muster over putative gas chambers for Jews in the Soviet Union is that the genocide might raise a humanitarian concern.
Kissinger’s has childishly sermonized, “Power is the great aphrodisiac,” more a projection of himself than a universal truth. Is that puerility a precept for raising children or inspiring adults?
There may be better ways to embolden the brutish reptiles of our nature, but if there are, they do not readily come to mind.

This Blogger’s Books from
American Empire Before the Fall
by Bruce Fein
Constitutional Peril: The Life and Death Struggle for Our Constitution and Democracy
by Bruce Fein

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

How can we teach our kids to realize that there’s more to fulfillment than the next video game, cell phone or fast food drive-through?
How do we teach our kids that what’s going to fill them up is giving not getting?
As the mother of an eight-year-old boy and the founder of Just Like My Child Foundation, an international organization that saves the lives of thousands of mothers and kids, I am constantly thinking of how to move children from “me” to “we.”
After eight trips to Africa on behalf of our non-profit enterprise here are my Five Steps to Raising Globally Conscious Kids.
1. Identify a cause. There is something so beautiful and pure about a child’s innate passion and energy. Don’t be afraid to leverage this! Ask your child: “What do you feel passionately about and love more than anything else?” What is your child naturally interested in? Expose your kids to a cause you feel strongly about, even if it’s by sharing information with them, showing them an article in the paper about poverty or a great story of triumph over tragedy.
I have seen so many kids in Africa deal with things that my son will never have to know, and yet they smile through the day and are as willing and happy to love. Kids can handle way more than we imagine. Try to focus their inherent passion on a meaningful cause.
2. Interpret why it matters. Help your child to interpret why becoming conscious of others is important to them. Develop their natural instinct to be compassionate beings.
Why should they care that children they will never meet are dying of a disease that will never affect them? Why should they care if the polar ice cap is melting?
Introduce the concept of “oneness” – we are all in this together. The kids on the other side of the world are just like them; the earth is our home.
3. Make it interesting. Give them something to be interested in! Give them something that they can champion, something that will build their confidence in their own ability to make a difference.
We’ve been working in a number of schools now, sharing a program we call “Be The Change — Spare Change Bringing Big Change to the Fight Against Malaria.” We go into schools and teach a curriculum on kids in Africa, really underscoring how similar we all are. We teach a bit about malaria and how a simple $10 insecticide-treated bed net can save up to three lives.
We open up the presentation to questions. Surprisingly, I never have enough time to answer all the questions because they are SO eager to learn more. Invariably, the kids ask how they can help and practically mow me over with ways to collect spare change to make a difference.
4. Get them involved. One of the best ways to engage kids is to “involve” them in a project. When we do a “Be The Change” campaign in a school, the kids have free reign to create their own collection jars, design their campaign posters, pick a goal they want to reach (like raising enough to buy 300 bed nets), and then choose their own reward, like an ice cream or pizza party for the winning classroom.
When you involve them in the process, it becomes their own, and they LOVE this! And kids are so capable and creative. Their ideas are guaranteed to amaze and surprise you.
Serving in the local community with your kids through small volunteer projects (which abound everywhere) is a great antidote to consumerism.
After spending a day distributing meals to the homeless, it’s far less likely that you’ll be getting the plea to buy your kids anything new on the way home!
5. Let Them Struggle. Our children need to struggle to grow stronger. Allowing them to feel their own pain helps them feel the pain of others. This is the only way to learn compassion, which literally means, “to suffer together with.”
What I want more than anything in the world is for my little boy to be happy. As I see life unveil itself to him, I’ve learned that he’s going to have to manufacture his happiness from within. If he learns to turn the challenges he encounters into learning opportunities, he will develop the inner strength to carry him through life. This self-reliance will help him to be “happy for no reason.”
As a mom, I often reference the story of the little boy and the butterfly. The little boy comes upon a chrysalis, a cocoon of a caterpillar ready to emerge into a butterfly. The boy watches the butterfly struggle to break free of its home. Taking pity on the butterfly, the boy removes the chrysalis for the butterfly. The butterfly spreads its beautiful wings a few times and then, unable to fly, lays down and dies.
The butterfly needed to struggle out of its shell to gain the strength to fly and live.
The Buddha said, “Compassion is that which makes the heart of the good move at the pain of others. It crushes and destroys the pain of others.” Your child’s heart already inherently knows this, and all you have to do is guide him or her along the way to ensure they are clear about what it looks and feels like to be a globally conscious human being.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Every film is like a different planet with its own solar system. The only constant for me is after the film is completed — I watch the emotions behind the actors’ eyes. From there, I begin to find a score.
For The Tempest, Julie Taymor created quite a sparse and stark world on that black lava rock. Only when Ariel shows up do you see any signs of enchantment. Otherwise it is the human condition illuminated in the full glow of sun. There was nothing to hide behind.
In terms of scoring Shakespeare, the language may be slightly different, but the content remains contemporary for all times. In terms of the basic tenets of love and seduction, they haven’t changed since The Tempest was written around 1610. Shakespeare has the human condition down pat. Nothing is as it seems for his characters who are always shrouded in deeper meanings. No one is just evil or good or funny — there are many things at play for these personalities.
I first set out to find a mysterious set of sounds for the Islands. It’s a very isolated place. Presumably there are only the survivors, demigods, nymphs, non-human entities, and weird sounds. You hear this on the tracks “Rough Magic,” and “Alchemical Lightshow” — a piece which stares into space and marvels at the celestial painting.
The score was wrought with challenges. The opening of the film, (the storm) which I call “Hell is Empty,” was my biggest challenge. With the unrelenting wind, pelting rain, and torrents of Shakespearian dialogue, I decided to limit myself to mostly three-to-five notes and an abundance of musicians. For the guitars, I used a bunch of conventional guitars — tuned unconventionally. This builds to a climax with Prospera’s (Helen Mirren) voiceless primal scream, which I scored with multi-layered alto and tenor saxophones blaring multi-phonics over string orchestra.
For Ariel, we crafted a sound as light and airy as the name, and found an instrument invented by Ben Franklin — the glass armonica, which sounds like champagne glasses played with fingertips. It was combined with acoustic flutes resonating through a 50,000-gallon steel storage tank, and a steel cello paired with a conventional one.
Initially, Julie wanted to omit Prospera’s final speech as she felt it was more suited to the stage than the screen. She later changed her mind and came up with the idea of using the soliloquy as a song over the end titles. Given it was Shakespeare’s last, and arguably one of his most important speeches, I locked myself in my apartment for four days and plowed through equal parts beer and doubt until “Prospera’s Coda” emerged. I needed to find an appropriate artist, who, as in a relay race, could be handed the baton from the great Helen Mirren. Beth Gibbons of Portishead has a unique way of connecting dramatically with words, and ran with it beautifully.
One of the most joyous discoveries Julie made was when she noticed in Reeve Carney, “I believe we have a potential singer here.” And she asked me to write a song for him, which would give more screen time (and credence) to the love story of Ferdinand and Miranda (Felicity Jones). I pulled a song called “O Mistress Mine” out of Twelfth Night and added it to the score.
In the other play, it’s lascivious — an older guy coming on to a younger girl. In this case, they are both young lovers, so the lyrics sound (and feel) completely different when sung by a young person.
I had a very specific concept for this and Reeve is an amazingly talented, lyrical singer — very pure, very beautiful. The Tempest marks Reeve’s Shakespearean and (really his general) acting debut. Ferdinand is a very difficult role — the language is very challenging. And when you put songs in a movie, they have to be composed before they are shot. Then it is the actor’s, in this case Reeve’s job, to make it work dramatically. He’s doing that in a major way with Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. He takes your breath away with those gorgeous songs Bono and Edge wrote.
Shakespeare tends to mix meter when there are lyrics. His songs are much simpler, with fewer analogies and thoughts than in his verse. When he writes lyrics, he understands the music behind it. It’s less complicated.
For an actor, the thing about Shakespeare lyrics (and his verse too, really) is they feel good in the mouth. As a composer, I take a few liberties. The technique, melisma, where you take one vowel and stretch it into a few notes, helps immensely. You hear it a lot in rock and roll. John Lennon used this technique all the time. (And did it really well for that matter.)
Sometimes purists are turned off by accompanying anything Shakespeare wrote with any kind of arrangement, forgetting, of course, that in his time, his songs often featured a lute — so our guitars are really not that far off.
I am fortunate to have wonderful musicians like Page Hamilton, Benjamin Curtis, Mark Stewart, and the late, great T-Bone Wolk — these guys go back with me fifteen years so we’re almost like a band. It’s a wonderful collection of musicians who understand how each of us works really well.
We had an idea to take the song “O Mistress Mine” out of context from The Tempest, and make a video out of it. The one aspect that remained was the idea of water. In this case, the water is somewhere between tears and rain, as a misty sadness purveys the whole piece. Reeve is blessed with a face you can watch for hours and hours. He doesn’t have to do too much. See for yourself:
O-Mistress-Mine FINAL 1080P H264 medium-high from Jules Cazedessus on Vimeo.
Along with my terrific DP, Pablo Berron, I shot this with Reeve and two pools of water against a black void. It is a composite of a high definition camera on a dolly, an 8-millimeter hand-held and an 8-millimeter B&W. I cut back and forth with the 8-millimeter images to create the graininess. Bright lights shined right into the lens to create the flashes of light you see here and there. I also used a nano lens for the super-close ups of his face, the guitar strings and his forearm. I was going for an uneven sparkle, “a flame in slow motion” kind of effect.
In the 19th Century, the score was a complete document. We’ve since progressed in technology. There is no more fine-tuned document than an actual audio reproduction. However, years of working with labels and studios have seen my scores altered with mixes I didn’t create or didn’t approve. Sometimes the whole piece didn’t play through, and I had to endure my share of bad pop music along with my score on the same album. Sometimes I went through the process of mixing an album, which they didn’t bother to put out. Many scores went out of print. Fans ask me about them to this day.
So I created a new label, Zarathustra Music, to ensure my fans get exactly what I intend. All the decisions and mixes are what I intended, for better or worse — so forty years from now, you’ll know what I meant. It also allows me to build an experience beyond the score with videos and create projects like this. The Tempest score is our first release.
When I was writing “Prospera’s Coda,” I was reminded with his words “Let your indulgences set me free” that Shakespeare exited the stage never to write another play. For me, it’s nice to think of every work as potentially your last, and it’s a good idea to make the most of it.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

In “The Efficiency Dilemma,” The New Yorker (December 20, 2010), David Owen revives a discredited 19th century article on economics to posit that the increasing efficiency of household products such as refrigerators and air conditioners is responsible for a range of problems, including everything from food waste to America’s culture of excess. Owen argues (apparently seriously) that by allowing consumers to save money that would otherwise go to high and wasted energy bills, efficient appliances have caused Americans to abandon the simple life.
Owen – whose expertise lies in the unrelated field of golfing (I’m not making this up), has unfortunately cobbled together this thesis without the benefit of facts or data. In the real world, efficient appliances (and the laws and policies that make them increasingly efficient) play a major role in reducing household energy usage, slashing energy bills for those consumers who can least afford them, and avoiding the need to build new costly power plants. Sad to say, this article – however well-intentioned, is a great example of misguided pseudo-analysis that is based on rank speculation made worse by gross errors of fact.
The reality is that the increase in efficiency of appliances is a huge success story for all consumers who benefit from the savings these products provide. Refrigerator energy use was growing with a trend that would have resulted in electricity demand of about 175 GW by today; but with efficiency policies that level of power demand was cut to less than 15 GW. The difference, about 160 GW, compares to about 125 GW provided by the entire nuclear power fleet in the United States, or to 400 large coal plants that were expected to be needed but now are not.
Owen, however, blames a host of evils on efficiency, but fails to back up his accusations with facts. Owen starts by conceding that serious energy analysis of rebound effects shows them to be “comparatively trivial.” People who insulate their houses don’t absorb all the savings by sweltering through the winter, and buyers of efficient refrigerators don’t start leaving the door open gratuitously. But after admitting that the serious studies show rebound effects to be small and getting smaller over time, he does nothing to address the finding of the studies but instead starts writing a fairy-tale story of how efficient refrigerators don’t really save energy because somehow efficiency is responsible for the growing size of refrigerators, the increasing extent of refrigeration, and even the growing girth of Americans. The author notes how the size and feature offerings of refrigerators increased rapidly from 1954 until recently, and then, with out-of-the blue imagination, tries to link this to efficiency increases.
The facts stubbornly contradict this hypothesis, however. Figure 1 shows that trend in refrigerator size and energy use. What leaps out from the graph is that the big, fast increase in size (the red line) occurred when efficiency was declining. When efficiency began to improve, after 1972, the trend toward increasing size slowed down. This is positive evidence that the rebound hypothesis is false, at least for refrigerators, Owen’s first example of choice. The growth in energy services in home refrigerators evidently has at best no relationship to efficiency, or even worse for this author’s point, is inversely correlated: the evidence suggests that greater efficiency implies more satiation with energy services.
Owen then refers to the great increase in refrigeration in stores, a phenomenon he asserts but does not demonstrate to be true, somehow trying to relate it to the efficiency of home refrigerators. A more plausible speculation is that it had to do with the trend towards suburban sprawl, where the absence of retail food stores within walking distance of homes leads to people making longer trips to the grocery store at less frequency and (necessarily) picking up more food each time. Even this explanation does not necessarily imply that the shelf area that is refrigerated must, or did, increase. And when Owen refers to the kitchen of a friend of his with multiple refrigerators and freezers, he apparently is unaware of the fact that there were already 15% more home refrigerators than homes in 1973 when refrigerator efficiency was at its low point. The number is hardly different today.
The speculation then extends to air conditioners. Did air conditioning get much more common after 1960 because the cost of cool air went down? The facts are that the efficiency of air conditioners was not regulated until 1978 and even then only at the state level. National standards for air conditioners did not take effect until 1992. So to support his hypothesis, the author would also have to show that air conditioners’ market share started to rise in 1992, which he doesn’t do. In large part because it is not true.
Instead, he uses cooling as an example of how demand for energy services can grow. But this is undisputed, and is included in every forecast of energy use with or without efficiency policies. Efficiency does not mean restraining energy services growth. It means using less for the same amount of service. The author is confusing this trend with the sometimes-on sometimes-off trend towards more efficiency, and claiming that more efficiency induces more demand for energy services. Again, this is what the serious studies were addressing when they found the effect to be “comparatively trivial.”
The problem is that he has not presented any evidence that this is happening in the real world: all of the examples he talks about (at great length) are devoid of any mention of how one could relate the energy service demand growth to efficiency as opposed to other economic factors. He does not even say how one could do so, much less present evidence that someone has really done so.
The clearest test, though, of the author’s hypothesis is whether an economy that embarks seriously on efficiency policy really can cut its overall energy use. Because without question, if the author’s thesis has any plausibility at all, the answer has to be “no”; or at least “not nearly as much as predicted.
Fortunately for the cause of economic truth, we have such an experiment. California embarked on a broad set of policy reforms to encourage efficiency and promote renewable energy in 1974.
Figure 2 shows the expected results: the ones Owen claims should not show up in overall consumption data. These are the projected savings from energy efficiency programs, derived year by year in real time by the California Energy Commission.
Figure 3 shows the realized results for the whole California economy. As you can see, the reduction in electricity use compared to the rest of the US is not smaller than the projections, it is bigger. Figure 2 shows efficiency programs to have resulted in a 15% reduction in usage, but Figure 3 shows an actual reduction of 40% compared to the rest of the country (which itself saw reductions in electricity use due to efficiency).
So if anything is rebounding, it is the influence of energy efficiency policies—they are causing a whole economy (California would be the 8th largest national economy in the world if it were a nation) to save much more than one would expect. California is not the only example of a state or country promoting efficiency through policy and then showing divergent usage trends from its neighbors and thus demonstrating that energy really is saved. Perhaps this is why the serious studies to which Owens referred found that the economy-wide rebound effect is trivially small.
And more detailed versions of this graph also refute Owen’s attempt to claim that energy use really would be increasing if we also consider the energy use embedded in things we used to manufacture domestically but now import. The detailed version looks separately at residential, commercial, and industrial uses of electricity in California compared to the rest of the nation. The graph looks just the same. So while one can still argue about how much different the industrial sector would look if we added in Chinese imports, clearly we are not importing buildings or the operation of our lights and appliances.
This is not inconsistent with theory. One of the biggest impediments to saving energy is that it is so small a fraction of GDP—the author suggests 6%. This is too small for people to pay much attention to. So not only do people ignore efficiency, absent policy, they ignore conservation as well. Thus we see stories like our own office’s experience with efficient lighting. When NRDC moved into a new space in San Francisco in about 1988, we negotiated with the landlord to pay for a much more efficient lighting system by agreeing to pay the extra up front but then reap the savings in utility bills compared to an agreed upon baseline every month. To determine savings, the landlord metered our lighting.
But the fact that we were paying for the lights, and the visible reminder that the lighting was special and efficient (it looked much better than inefficient building standard lighting) caused our staff to cut the hours of operation by over half compared to the baseline. We not only got the savings from efficiency, but they were redoubled by behavior changes, even though we did or said nothing to encourage this behavioral change.
Efficient appliances save energy, reduce energy bills and rates, avoid the need to build new power plants, and save Americans money. It’s really that simple.
This post was first published on NRDC’s Switchboard blog.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

This Sunday the Bucs, in full control of their playoff destiny, lost to the Detroit Lions 23-20. The same Detroit Lions, mind you, who had lost the previous 26 road games. The Drew Stanton-led Detroit Lions. THE DETROIT LIONS.
Effing game.
As with most of this season’s losses (Saints and Steelers games excepted), this Lions game was eminently winnable. But the Bucs didn’t win. You know who I blame for that?
1. The effing refs.I have two conspiracy theories on the decidedly un-home team-friendly crew.
First: This was the same officiating crew that stole the Bears’ game away from the Lions, and they were playing make up.
Second: One or more of the crew members’ wives grew up in Detroit. And the refs didn’t want to sleep on the couch.
Because there were a number of questionable calls that went against the Bucs. Drew Stanton appears to fumble the ball, it’s called an incomplete pass. Stanton throws to an invisible receiver, intentional grounding is called, but the refs negate the penalty because the QB’s arm was hit.
In overtime, Calvin Johnson catches a 12-yard pass on 3rd and 8 and tippy-toes the sideline, and the refs decide not to review the play. Maybe it is a catch, but the challenge has to come from the officials and they won’t even review the play.
But worst of all was the series of events in the fourth quarter with the Bucs at the Lions’ 1-yard line. Josh Freeman threw the ball to the endzone, where Kellen Winslow and a defender were hugging it out. K2 still somehow managed to catch the potentially game-winning touchdown, but it was called offensive pass interference. That call is only legit if the defender is called, too, because hugs are a two-way street. (Right, ref? Not getting enough of those from your Michigander wife?)
In the ensuing play, Mike Williams couldn’t hang on to another potential touchdown pass because the defender got a little too handsy. But this time no pass interference was called.
2. The effing playcalling. Not to let up on the effing refs, but with the game tied with fewer than 10 minutes left in the fourth quarter and a 1st and 1 at the goal line, you pound that ball, right? The Bucs do have a 6’5 250-lb. QB and a similarly sized running back in LaGarette Blount. But this was how the Bucs played the downs:
1st-QB sneak, 0 yards
2nd-Earnest Graham rush, -1 yard
3rd-Pass to Winslow, penaltly, -10 yards
3rd-Pass to Williams, no catch, no penalty
4th-Field goal, Connor Barth
Next drive, the Lions marched down the field and scored a tying field goal, which led to overtime.
Sure, Freeman was unsuccessful in the QB sneak for the first time all season on the first down, but his odds have to be pretty good if you try it again. 6’5. 250.
And what about Blount? Cadillac Williams was running well early in the game, but Blount had 110 yards on 15 carries-and only 15 carries. Blount touched the ball just 4 times in the fourth quarter (for 36 yards), when the game was on the line.
3. Calvin effing Johnson. Watching Johnson line up across the line of scrimmage from the members of the Bucs’ secondary was one of the more comical aspects of the game. It looked like Johnson could have picked up Ronde Barber between his thumb and forefinger and swallowed him whole, so great was the size difference. Aqib Talib, at 6’2, would have at least had a chance against the monster receiver. But Calvin Johnson vs. E.J. Biggers? Calvin Johnson vs. Elbert Mack? Yikes.
4. The effing injuries. You know you’ve got injury issues when a rookie special teams-playing wide receiver is in at safety. According to radio analyst Dave Moore, Preston Parker did just that. Preston, you win the “Single Player as Analogy for Entire Season” Award.
The Bucs team is ravaged with injuries, having lost 6 starters in the past 3 weeks alone. And it showed.
Without Talib, Tanard Jackson, Cody Grimm, Gerald McCoy, and Brian Price, the Bucs were unable to stop the run (RB Maurice Morris picked up half as many yards in one game as he’d previously gained all year) and unable to rush the passer (2 hits and no sacks on future HOF QB Drew Stanton).
5. The effing penalties. With a rookie team, penalties are bound to happen. Fine. But the Bucs’ delay of game penalty in the 2nd quarter and 12 men on the field penalty in the 4th were inexcusable. (Oh, and welcome back to the lineup, Jeremy “False Start” Trueblood.)
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whose fault the loss is. The Bucs are now all but eliminated from the playoff hunt, and frankly would likely be massacred if they make it.
Still, with at least 8 wins this year and some unreal young talent on offense, these young Bucs have been pretty effing fun to watch.
Cross published at Chicks in the Huddle.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Davis Guggenheim’s Waiting for “Superman” hit movie screens this fall, just as the nation’s 56 million children were heading back to school. The documentary, which puts the U.S. public school system under the microscope, exposing all warts, has inspired fierce debate among educators and reformers, many of whom have bristled at its strong critique — or villainizing, as they charge — of unions and teachers. They point to the absence of innovative models of public schools. Also given short shrift in this cinematic expose — now up for an Oscar — is early childhood education.
What happens to children from birth to 5, before they reach the school-house door, is nothing less than a revelation. Neuroscientists, who have been studying children’s brains for the past three decades, confirm the dazzling pace of brain development in these early years. By age 2, the number of synapses reaches adult levels, and by age 3, children’s brains are twice as active as those of adults. Sensitive, stimulating, and enriching early care and education actually creates the architecture of the brain, building a child’s capacity to learn and grow — cognitively, emotionally, and socially — and establishing a foundation for later academic achievement and life success.
Researchers have long documented the positive outcomes of high-quality early childhood education, including readiness for school, greater academic achievement, higher rates of high school and college completion, lower rates of incarceration, and higher incomes. And labor economists point to the substantial economic benefits for investing in early childhood education. To successfully reform our nation’s public school system, early childhood education must be an integral part of the equation.
Too many of our country’s youngest children, however, lack the optimal circumstances for growth and development. According to the National Center for Children in Poverty, of the 25 million young children under the age of 6 in the United States, 46 percent live in low-income families and 24 percent are growing up in poverty. The high levels of family stress and trauma often associated with poverty may result in discontinuity in the quality of children’s daily care and education, compromising children’s readiness for school.
A recent synthesis of readiness research by the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory confirms that young children’s cognitive and social skills in kindergarten are of long-term importance. Kindergarten teachers rate high among readiness indicators physical well-being, social development, and curiosity, along with the ability to communicate needs, thoughts and enthusiasm for learning. While reliable tools for assessing children’s readiness are still evolving, anecdotal evidence from states across the United States confirms that growing numbers of children — many of them low-income — are struggling in kindergarten.
Indeed, studies show that at least half of the educational achievement gap between poor children and their more advantaged peers is evident in the kindergarten classroom. Children from low-income families often start school with limited language skills as well as social and emotional problems that inhibit learning. And those who start behind are much more likely to stay behind. Today, for example, the average African-American or Hispanic high school student achieves only at the level of the lowest quartile of white students. Black and Hispanic students are also much more likely than white students to drop out, and less likely to graduate from high school, complete college, and earn a living that offers entry into the middle class.
The persistence of the achievement gap has fueled education reform for decades, with early childhood education waxing and waning on the policy agenda. The needs of youth and those who educate them in K-12 classrooms and beyond, are equally urgent, and have justifiably demanded attention and resources as America’s global standing in education continues to plummet. This summer, the College Board announced that the United States ranks 12th among 36 developed nations in college completion rates. On October 15, at the first White House Science Fair, President Obama deemed students’ performance in math and science “unacceptable,” citing a study that found American 15-year-olds ranking 21st in science and 25th in math among their peers worldwide. We must do better, he exhorted, or risk being left behind in the global economy. The release, last week, of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) results, only ups the ante. “It’s a Sputnik moment,” Obama declared.
Fifteen — or 20, for that matter — is much too late to start turning things around. Learning begins at birth.
Just a few days before Waiting for “Superman” was released, Nobel-Prize-winning economist James Heckman wrote a letter to the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Reform. His question: What’s the best way to develop human capital to increase workforce capability, enhance productivity and social cohesion, and assure America’s economic competitiveness in the global economy? His answer: Invest in comprehensive early childhood development and education, from birth to age 5, especially for our most vulnerable children and families.
Reform strategies that focus exclusively on elementary, middle, secondary, and post-secondary education will not work.Philanthropic and public initiatives that favor one element of the system over another and ignore early childhood in the process are condemned to failure. We can’t afford to waste those earliest years of development, where the achievement gap is born.

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One of the greatest lessons to be learned from the Program for International Student Assessment report released this month is that equity matters.
Others might argue that economic competitiveness is the real issue here, considering that assessments of American 15-year-olds’ capabilities in reading, math and science rank low among the 34 nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which performed the study.
America’s performance reveals an “average” showing, with dangerous disparities: The 113-point gap in math literacy between the United States and No. 1 spot-holder Shanghai-China is the equivalent of more than two school years of schooling, a statistic sure to ruffle America’s economically competitive feathers.
There’s more to the PISA results, however, than mere number or rank. The real lesson is less about economic competitiveness and more about a country’s commitment to an equity-centered education.
While school systems across the globe are challenged with meeting the needs of students from disadvantaged backgrounds — be it low socio-economic status, single parent households, or foreign-born parents — the top PISA performers managed to still provide an equal, high-quality education to each child attending their schools. Whether it was Canada’s commitment to meet the needs of their immigrant students or China’s policy shift to a more inclusive school system, the best-performing countries demonstrated the power of setting high expectations for all students and investing in resources, teachers, and leaders to help students meet these high expectations, regardless of their family background or geographic location.
PISA revealed that for too many students, their socio-economic background can predict their success. Top performing countries, like Korea and Hong Kong-China, were able to break away from this international trend, doubling the average for the number of disadvantaged students excelling at school.
The evidence presented by PISA is compelling. The commitment by the top-ranking countries to serve each child’s needs translated not only into a fair and accessible education system, but one that clearly prepares its citizens with competitive 21st century knowledge and skills. Given equal educational opportunities to learn and achieve — regardless of race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic level — students in these top-performing countries were able to overcome barriers to achievement and excel at much higher rates.
We must do the same here in America. PISA measures of educational equity showed that impoverished and racially isolated schools in the United States simply did not measure up to essential conditions of equity.
Children attending such schools did not receive equal financing, equal access to qualified teachers, or adequate instructional resources. In fact, of the 34 OCED nations, America is one of only four countries that gives the advantage of access to more teachers to higher-income schools.
These facets of inequity in America’s public schools have robbed students of their right to an equal, quality education. As a result, there is a disparity in academic performance that falls along economic and racial lines. For too many students in America, education is not the great equalizer, as it is purported to be.
These lessons regarding equity, provided by PISA’s top performers, reflect a paradigm shift, not unlike the one I called for in the National Commission on Equity and Excellence, to be launched by the U.S. Department of Education in January 2011. Creating equity, and thus excellence, in our education system requires a plan of action that challenges our perception of who is capable of achieving at high levels, evaluates the individual needs of the students and their schools, and responds with strategic investment that ensures every child in America has access to qualified teachers, rigorous curriculum, tools and resources to meet high expectations, and more.
The takeaway is this: Prioritize equity in education. Our students deserve it. Our nation needs it. Our future depends on it.
Rep. Mike Honda, D-California, serves on the Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies, and is a former teacher, school principal and school board member. This article first published on CNN.com.

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It is hard to describe the state of affairs of the Arab-Israeli conflict at this particular juncture without using adjectives such as “sad,” “unfortunate” or even “tragic,” which I think is the most appropriate description. The collapse of the so-called Israeli-Palestinian peace process is indicative not only of the failure of the Israeli and Palestinian leadership, but of the other parties involved, in particular the Arab states and the Obama administration. It is a tragic situation because all the parties seem to focus on political expediency to explain away their failing policies while they lose the capacity show the vision and courage needed to avert the great regional disaster that is in the making.
I am not sure how Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants to be remembered. As things stand today, he will surely be recalled as the Prime Minister who twice lost an historic opportunity to forge peace with Israel’s remaining conflicting parties-the Palestinians, Syrians and the Lebanese. It is one thing to miss such an opportunity if the status quo remains frozen and can be revisited at leisure without major losses or risks. It is an entirely different matter, however, when the enemies of peace like extremist groups and Iran are steadily gaining power and will certainly pose a far greater danger to Israel in the absence of an Arab-Israeli peace. Netanyahu has shown not only a lack of ability to lead, but has been systematically engaged in deceiving his interlocutors, the Americans as well as the Palestinians, while misleading his own people. Using his right-wing government as an excuse for his inability to engage the Palestinians in earnest is nothing short of demagogy. He knows that he could have made basic-and for that matter inevitable-concessions to lure the Palestinians to the negotiating table. He could have also changed the composition of the government by dumping Shas and Israel Beiteinu and inviting Kadima to join him to put the Palestinians to the real test. But he opted not to, simply because he and his coalition partners are unwilling to make any meaningful concessions-regardless of what the Palestinians are doing or saying. Netanyahu may see a hopeful sign in the fact that the Obama administration has given up its effort to persuade Jerusalem to freeze construction in Jewish settlements, but the judgment of time will be much harsher than Netanyahu can imagine. The Israelis will end up paying a dear price for the tragic mistakes that he has willfully and even proudly committed.
Just as tragically, the Palestinian leadership does not fare any better. It is “understandable” that for ideological and political reasons Hamas will continue to hold onto its extreme position, albeit to the detriment of the Palestinians. But then, the same cannot be said about Fatah and its leader Mahmoud Abbas. Surely he has internal and external-from the Arab states-constraints, but that does not explain his failure to demonstrate leadership and go against the political grain to rise above past prejudices and skepticism. No leader can claim to want peace but then allow certain preconditions-the settlement freeze-to stop him from entering into serious negotiations. Moreover, President Abbas and his Prime Minister Salam Fayyad have failed to utilize the remarkable progress they made in maintaining security throughout the West Bank and their impressive economic developments to change the dynamic of the negotiations with Israel by changing the rules of engagement, including-however legitimate-the settlement freeze. Abbas remained bogged down in negotiations with Hamas, which unavoidably limited his maneuvering room in trying to negotiate with Israel. Although Mr. Abbas appears to be sincere and certainly committed to a non-violent solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he remains politically weak and isolated. Instead of taking new initiative, he relied heavily on the Americans to deliver the Israelis and on the Arab League to provide him with the political cover to engage or disengage the Netanyahu government, missing yet again another opportunity to reach an agreement.
The Arab states too have not fallen much shorter behind the Israelis and the Palestinians. What ever happened to the Arab Peace Initiative? Why is it that the Arab League led by Saudi Arabia has done next to nothing to promote their historic Initiative, especially among the Israelis who know very little about the document and even less about the Arab states’ real intentions to make peace? More than any other time, especially because of the growing Iranian threat, the Arab states have every reason to sort out their differences with Israel and begin some serious back-channel diplomacy to assure the Israelis of their true intentions behind their Initiative. It is not enough to present the Israelis with a general framework for a comprehensive peace; it is an entirely different matter to translate it into action. The Israelis, who have and continue to be extremely skeptical about the Arab states’ ultimate intentions, want to see a concrete move in the direction of normalization as virtually nothing has changed since the Arab league first introduced the API in 2002. The Arab states, to be sure, have become the victims of their own rhetoric, consistently maintaining the same political narrative. For example, the rhetoric about the Right of Return of Palestinian refugees gives Netanyahu the excuses he needs not to engage in serious negotiations.
The Arab states have a critical role to play; they can no longer blame a lack of peace solely on the Israelis. They have to do more to moderate Hamas’ position and take advantage of the changing regional geopolitical dynamic, especially in confronting Iran. The Wikileaks cables reveal with clarity the Arab states’ sentiment and profound fear of Iran’s growing influence. It is time to abandon their hypocrisy and take a stand against Hamas and Hezbollah to demonstrate that they are committed to regional stability by using their collective power to moderate the extremists. It is also time for the Arab League to make a real use of the remarkably important Arab Peace Initiative in order to foster the prospect of equitable peace.
Finally, the United States should take a much harder look at its initial failure to mediate an Israeli-Palestinian peace. Whereas the Obama administration received high marks for starting the peace process in the first days of assuming power, it must now accept the deserved blame for failing to properly assess the political and physical realities on the ground. It is time for the Obama administration to realize that even with the best of intentions, neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians will forge peace without a forceful American diplomacy and without a clear vision for the future. The Obama administration needs a new strategy and a new team while insisting on a much more active and direct involvement by the leading Arab states. The current team led by former Senator George Mitchell and Dennis Ross is tired and perhaps out of touch with the reality and the political constraints under which the Israelis and the Palestinians live. Moreover, Mr. Mitchell has demonstrated a lack of understanding of the underlining mindsets in both camps, specifically in connection with Israel’s national security and the future of the Palestinian refugees.
I maintain that it is time for the Obama administration to come up with its own plan and a new team to advance a new solution based on prior agreements and on negotiating borders first. President Obama has barely a year to achieve a breakthrough. He must make it abundantly clear to all parties that American national interests are being systematically undermined by the continuing conflict and an Israeli-Palestinian peace serves American strategic interests as much as it serves the interests of the Israelis and the Palestinians themselves. Neither Israel nor the Palestinians can seek continued American support and security guarantees but then ignore vital American interest in the area that are being undermined by Iran and Al-Qaeda. The United States has every right to demand that both sides come to grips with what is required to move toward a political solution. Unfortunately, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton added nothing new in her statement about the peace process at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy’s Seventh Annual Forum on December 10th. Now that Secretary Clinton feels that shuttle diplomacy may produce better results, the question is, why have Mitchell and Ross wasted two years trying everything else while failing to produce any substantial result? Time has come for the Obama administration to rethink an overall strategy and not to hesitate-should it become necessary-to bring any pressure to bear on both Israel and the Palestinian Authority to make the necessary concessions. If this precipitates the collapse of either government or both, so be it.
No single entity, be that Israel, the Palestinians, the Arab states or the United States, can achieve a comprehensive peace unless all parties are prepared to really make-and not just talk about making-critically necessary concessions or take a new initiative to achieve peace. While the conflict continues, the one and only country benefiting from-and contributing to-the impasse is Iran. Iran virtually controls all of Iraq, exerts enormous influence in Syria and holds tremendous sway in Lebanon. Iran is bent on developing nuclear weapons and is poised to become the region’s hegemon. Neither Israel, the Arab states nor the United States can or should allow that to happen. But this will happen as long as the Arab-Israeli conflict continues to simmer and as long as the leadership on all sides fail to rise to the historical call and instead pave the way for another catastrophic conflagration.
*A version of this article was originally published in the Jerusalem Post on December 17th and can be accessed at http://new.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=199697

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To paraphrase H.L Mencken, no one ever went broke underestimating how low a politician will go to gain an advantage.
Exhibit A: Vice President Joseph Biden, who likensWikileaks honchoJulian Assange to a “high-tech terrorist.”
What a nice marriage of images. Especially for those of us old enough to recall poor Clarence Thomas who, when charged with sexual harassment in his Supreme Court confirmation hearing, so deftly turned defense into offense by calling the accusations a “high-tech lynching for uppity blacks.”
Now that terrorism is the new communism, why shouldn’t everyone the government wants to vilify be labeled a terrorist?
Here’s a reason. Doing it with communism, which is an idea but not a crime, was bad enough. It trashed constitutional rights, ruined lives and fueled national divisions that clouded our ability to distinguish, and act rationally about, perceived and real threats. It was also Sen. Joe McCarthy’s vehicle to get an “ism” named after him for using baseless fear-mongering as a resume builder.
Doing it with terrorism gives you all the above, but wait, there’s more! Human Rights First has already noted its concerns,here andhere, about the damage to freedom of expression that comes with the territory of piling on against Wikileaks.
Terrorism is not just an idea or a theory. It is conduct designed to terrorize by scattering significant numbers of unsuspecting and innocent civilians’ body parts over a large area.
We may already have gone beyond a point of no return by irrationally equating all terrorism with war and describing all terrorists as enemy combatants – a clearly foolish thing to do since terrorists crave nothing more than to be seen as warriors rather than war criminals, or what is more typically the case, just plain old mass murderers. Congress’s decision this week toprevent federal criminal prosecution of Guantanamo detainees is a piece of this package – a bold contribution to fear-mongering at the expense of national security and accountability.
By calling a guy who publishes classified documents a terrorist Biden dilutes the meaning of the term. By the same token, absent evidence that Assange somehow participated in the initial leak of classified documents, every news organization, web site and dinner conversationalist who publishes or cites these materials is also now a terrorist.
What’s worse, this dilution diverts our attention from the task of fighting the true phenomenon that is terrorism.
On this point, I’d say you’re either with us or against us, Mr. Vice-President. You could ask the boss to send a predator drone after Julian Assange (kinda likehe jokingly threatened to do to any young whippersnapper who looks at his daughter the wrong way – ha, ha, ha).
Or you could retract if you truly respect the seriousness of what terrorism is, what its victims suffer, and that the way to fight it is through appeals to reason, not bluster.

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Another year, another UN climate change summit and still no sign of a legally binding global deal. Expectations for Cancn were so low that its piecemeal achievements have won widespread praise. But once again negotiators have kicked the tough questions into the long grass. Voluntary and inadequate pledges have been recorded with no means of enforcement. A ‘Green Fund’ to help developing countries has been established with no guarantees on where the money will come from.
Cancn’s questionable progress should not silence calls for negotiations to move away from the discredited UN process to direct talks between a handful of key nations. This shift from multilateralism to a ‘megalateral’ model would greatly increase the chances of solving a problem which can wait no longer for bureaucratic dithering.
The time has come for the big players to take control. Just as President Obama may resort to federal regulation of emissions in the face of congressional opposition to cap and trade legislation, at the global level dominant nations must eschew UN gridlock and act decisively. The morality of executive fiat depends on its context. The logic behind ‘megalateralism’ underpinned the Bush administration’s decision to bypass the UN over Iraq; but with climate change the end justifies the means.
A ‘megalateral’ agreement can be global in reach because the bulk of future emissions will be concentrated among only a few countries. The vast majority of states which attend UN conferences are irrelevant when it comes to the necessary emissions cuts. Fairness suggests that those most at risk from climate disruption deserve a voice, but in reality their presence has hindered any chance of the deal they need.
Scientists warn that significant action is required within the current decade to avoid irreversible, dangerous warming. Yet the UN negotiations have lost all sense of urgency. In Poznan, 2008, diplomats insisted that the deal must be struck in Copenhagen the following year. When things fell apart in Copenhagen, leaders reassured us that Cancn 2010 would bring resolution.
However, most wrote off the possibility of a legally binding deal at Cancn long before the summit began. Key players, from US negotiator Todd Stern to Indian environment minister Jairam Ramesh were admitting publicly several months prior that “there is no breakthrough possible in Cancn.” Thanks to Wikileaks we now know the president of the EU had “given up” on Cancn as far back as December 2009. Astonishingly, the UN’s climate chief confesses she does not foresee a final agreement in her lifetime.
The UN talks are painful to watch. Any one of the 194 nations can — and often does — delay proceedings over anything from a comma to a draft text. With so many participants a UN deal can impose only as much as bottleneck countries agree to. The Kyoto Protocol, for example, accomplished so little because of concessions given to ensure Japanese, Russian and Canadian involvement. As if opposition from crucial players was not enough, the likes of Tuvalu and Bolivia have been able to bring negotiations to a standstill in Copenhagen and Cancn.
Britain’s Energy and Climate Change Secretary Chris Huhne dismisses as uninformed the “armchair critics” who doubt the likelihood of a UN agreement. Yet Huhne errs in citing the successful Montreal Protocol on the ozone layer. Multilateral action on ozone occurred only because it was in the self-interest of individual countries (notably the US) to act even without international cooperation. Significant benefits including billions of dollars worth of avoided cancer-related health care expenses coupled with relatively low cost solutions made it a no-brainer.
In contrast, consensus on the economic case for reducing carbon has yet to be reached. While Montreal provided benefits to current generations because it aimed to restore the ozone by 2050, some place less value on avoiding climate change damage 100 years from now.
Of course, these financial concerns would not be fixed by altering the negotiation process. But at least a ‘megalateral’ approach would allow major emitters to concentrate on a manageable list of agendas. Free from UN strictures, they could also include non-environmental issues such as currency and trade to compensate potential losers. With five parties instead of 194, compromise is possible. In the dying hours of the Copenhagen summit South Africa, Brazil, India, China and the US broke away from the formal UN process and scrambled together a face-saving (if unambitious) agreement. Imagine what they could attain in two weeks.
Critics will point to the lack of accountability and democracy in such an approach. But ask the people of Tuvalu if they would rather have representation at an ineffectual UN conference or real action to stop climate disruption, and there can be only one answer. Rising sea levels will not wait while UN delegates dither.
Some argue we must trust the private sector to make green development profitable enough to slow warming. This is wishful thinking. Win-win opportunities exist, but not to the extent required to cut emissions radically. The necessity and possibility of a top-down, international approach has not disappeared as other critics of the UN process have claimed. Nor is it acceptable to abandon mitigation efforts and concentrate instead on adaptation. But a coordinated intergovernmental response to climate change will require a new, more exclusive theater for negotiations.
Tommy Stadlen is a London-based strategy consultant who specializes in sustainability. He is an op-ed contributor to media outlets across the world on climate change and sustainable business.

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These thoughts were inspired by an exchange I watched on CNBC this morning between Tom Friedman, Pulitzer prize winning author and columnist for the New York Times and Joe Kernen, a co-anchor on CNBC’s Squawk Box. Friedman commented that although the extension of the Bush tax cuts may have been necessary given the state of the economy, they added billions of dollars to our debt to China. He argued correctly that the only way for the U.S. to get out of our difficulties is to find a way to create jobs, reduce debt, innovate products that allow us to become competitive, improve education and increase immigration of highly qualified people. Kernen didn’t see why the tax reduction should be characterized as increasing the debt to China since it was “our money” and thought the real solution to all the problems was to just “get the government out of the way.”
As I see the political structure of America both of these concepts fall into the realm of the make believe world. Yes, Friedman is right on target as to what is needed for this country to regain its financial and political position. It would be great if the nation would be able to gird its loins and face the realities of the huge competitive and structural unemployment, the debt, the failure of our education system and the damaging restrictions on immigration. Unfortunately, the simplistic formulation by Kernen explains why all that will not happen.
I previously noted that creating jobs, reducing the debt and making America competitive
I raised the question: “Can the American democratic system manage such painful change… Can our democracy survive when it has to take from each constituency something of great value?
The first test of our willingness to make tough choices came up in the extension of the Bush tax cuts and we saw part of the answer. True, there was a rationalization for not increasing taxes on the middle class during this stressful economic period but the extension of benefits went well beyond the middle class to the very wealthy and included reducing estate and other taxes. It is not a great leap of the imagination to expect that when the cuts expire in 2012 — an election year — they will be extended again.
We also witnessed the reaction to the efforts by the Simpson-Bowles led National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. Even fourteen members of the Commission could not agree on the recommendations in order to bring them to the floor of Congress. Moreover, its recommendations were immediately denounced by elements on the left and the right.
The Kernen mantra that we should just “get government out of the way” disguises the problem with misdirection. The bulk of pubic spending is on Social Security, Medicare, the military and interest on the debt. There is no way that in our system the government will get out of the way of those activities and, in addition, we will always need services and programs that only the government and not business can deliver. There is also no possibility that the American electorate will vote for such a drastic approach. But repeating the mantra as if it were a solution, allows the cop out on what realistically could and must be done – the belt tightening sacrifices from all the American constituencies to reduce debt yet allocate resources to carry out the kind of recommendations that Friedman made. This is reality. Until it happens, we will continue to live in a world of “make believe” and neither “get government out of the way” nor carry out Friedman’s recommendations.
Robert K. Lifton has written extensively on political, business and economic issues. He is presently writing a memoir titled: Life’s Stories and Lessons from a Member of the ‘Greatest Generation.

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How appropriate that the Federal Communications Commission has picked the darkest day of the year to vote on its new Net Neutrality rules. Unless they are dramatically improved at the 11th hour, the FCC’s proposal will go down as one of the bleakest moments in the history of the Internet.
We will look back years from now on Tuesday’s vote as a squandered opportunity, where old-fashioned D.C. politics, weak-kneed FCC leadership, and jaw-dropping short-sightedness sacrificed the most remarkable engine for economic innovation, democratic participation and free speech ever invented.
I’m not saying this is the end of the fight or that new and amazing things won’t happen online, but the FCC’s epic failure to get this right will make things unquestionably worse. Somehow, an FCC chairman cheered on by millions of Americans and backed by a presidential endorsement ended up making rules designed to win over AT&T, rather than you and me.
Net Neutrality’s supporters are being asked to compromise and cave so that the biggest phone and cable companies don’t make things uncomfortable for Julius Genachowski in the next Congress. So in the waning days before the vote, the chairman and his proxies have been spending their time slandering the principled members of the commission and cajoling tech-company CEOs to remain uncritical unless they want their other priorities to be deep-sixed in the future.
Perhaps nothing better encapsulates the sorry state of things at the FCC than the pitiful PR campaign mounted by the Genachowski’s office to demonstrate support for his disappointing proposal. It turns out that most of the folks willing to stand behind the chairman are those who’ve been trying to kill Net Neutrality from the start.
The Enemy of My Policy Is My Friend?
Someone forwarded me a copy of the e-mail that Josh Gottheimer, the chairman’s chief spin doctor, has been sending around to reporters and congressional staffers touting all the “support” for the Net Neutrality proposal.
The cherry-picked quotes in this document fall into three categories: Net Neutrality haters who seem way too pleased with what the FCC is doing, critics being wrongly claimed as supporters, and a few actual supporters.
Let’s start with the long list of Net Neutrality opponents backing Genachowski’s proposal. These include corporations that have spent millions of dollars to prevent the FCC from protecting Internet users. (Texas Republican Joe Barton was so surprised to see the biggest companies praising Genachowski that he accused the FCC of distorting their views.)
That they’re now applauding the FCC chairman should give everyone pause. Indeed, it should suggest that the rule will best protect the interests of Net Neutrality haters, rather than the interests of the American public. Here’s just a sampling of how some of Genachowski’s newest fans have described Net Neutrality in the past:
AT&T: “There is no potential upside to Net Neutrality regulation.”
National Cable and Telecommunications Association (NCTA): “Net neutrality is nothing more than a scheme by the multi-billion dollar silicon valley tech companies to get you, the consumer, to pay more for their services.”
Time Warner Cable: “Any ‘net neutrality’ mandates would lead to a variety of adverse unintended consequences.”
CTIA-The Wireless Association: “Imposition of net neutrality obligations on mobile wireless broadband providers would harm consumers and undermine wireless networks.”
Alliance for Digital Equality: “We are concerned that these extreme proposals, backed by groups outside of the mainstream carry potentially long-term negative effects that could seriously hinder the ability of minority and low-income communities to thrive in the 21st century.”
Hispanic Technology and Telecommunications Partnership (HTTP): “We believe that no compelling reason currently exists to establish new regulations.”
Of course, such preposterous claims have been debunked countless times; the companies’ real motives have been exposed; and the questionable motives of civil rights groups have been criticized. Yet we still find ourselves at a moment where the FCC is not only trying to please these companies and their well-financed front groups, they’re seemingly thrilled to have their support.
How Low Will the FCC Go?
Moreover, at least four of the chairman’s supposed supporters were outspoken critics of the proposed rules. Gottheimer plucked the rote platitudes praising the process from their statements but excluded the inconvenient critiques. It’s impossible to read Rep. Mike Doyle’s statement as an endorsement (“As with all laws and regulations, the details make all the difference between a success and a sell-out.”); the Open Internet Coalition took out ads questioning the deal; DISH Network lobbied against it; and the Future of Music Coalition joined 80 other groups on a letter detailing everything wrong with the chairman’s approach.
To be fair, there is some wan support: at least one endorser of the chairman’s plan (craigslist founder Craig Newmark) has been an outspoken Net Neutrality champion; two consumer groups that had already endorsed weak rules are standing by the chairman; three Democratic senators sent a letter; a small handful of venture capitalists cheered (though there were plenty of critics of the FCC in the VC community); and one academic rousingly considered it “the realistic way forward.”
The rest of the support came from companies that tried to stay out of the debate (Microsoft, IBM) or seemed to like the proposal because it was good for the big phone and cable companies (Citigroup). Oh, and the White House was so enthused they offered the chairman their support via a two-paragraph blog post — not exactly a trip to the Rose Garden.
But when the vast majority of your so-called supporters either strongly oppose your basic policy goals or don’t actually support you, you can be pretty sure that your approach is coming up short.
That, in a nutshell, is how you end up with fake Net Neutrality.

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That obit is from the NYT.
When I joined the World Bank in 1986, my first memory is of my colleague Bruce Benton yelling in French over the phone across the Atlantic to Dr. Le Berre. I remember wondering what he was yelling about. Bruce did not join many meetings or participate in the various fads and “sexy” initiatives in the Bank. He just steadily and consistently worked with Dr. Le Berre and his program for twenty years, from 1985 to 2005, saving hundreds of thousands of lives, sparing millions of children from affliction, and reclaiming millions of hectares of land for habitation and cultivation. All at a nominal cost, representing a tremendous return on investment.
A very nice brief by the Center for Global Development on the impact of the river blindness control program is here.
www.globalgiving.org, Pulling for the Underdog

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If you look closely at the AP photograph of the South Korean marines conducting a drill on Yeonpyoeong island, you can see that their yellow headbands read tongil. That’s the Korean word for reunification. With the South Korean government conducting another round of live-fire artillery drills in contested waters near North Korea, the message of the headband is unambiguous. Rather than waiting patiently for reunification to take place through negotiations, the Lee Myoung-bak administration wants to accelerate the process, by force if necessary.
When South Korea conducted live-fire drills in the area last month, North Korea responded by shelling Yeonpyeong island, killing two soldiers and two civilians. The South shelled back. This time around, the South disregarded pleas by China and Russia to postpone its military exercise. On Monday, it conducted 90 minutes of artillery shelling from Yeonpyeong island as South Korean jet fighters flew overhead. Despite initial threats to retaliate, North Korea has so far refrained from responding to what it has called a “despicable military provocation.”
South Korea’s resolve to go through with the test was simply a refusal to be bullied, argued many analysts, including former South Korean foreign minister Han Sung-Joo. “If each North Korean threat tied our hands, we would become hostage to their threats,” he commented.
As the yellow headbands indicate, however, the current South Korean government is not just sending a message of deterrence. The Lee Myung-bak government, like its recent predecessors, sees an opportunity to break the stalemate on the peninsula. But unlike either the Kim Dae-Jung or Roh Moo-Hyun administration, Lee doesn’t see a long, slow process of negotiating reunification.
When Lee looks north, he sees an ailing dictator, a struggling economy, and a desperate national-security apparatus. The Wikileaks documents, meanwhile, suggested that China was losing patience with its North Korean ally. All of this contributed to last week’s statement by the South Korean president that “unification is drawing near.” The South Korean government is putting money into preparing for regime collapse in the north in much the way the Kim and Roh governments put money into engaging the North economically and politically.
The U.S. government has generally backed the South Korean government’s more aggressive posture. Twenty U.S. soldiers participated in the recent live-fire drill. Joint South Korean-U.S. military exercises in these contested wars have ratcheted up the tensions. And at the United Nations, the United States has pushed for a condemnation of North Korea’s November 23 artillery attack to be included in a statement otherwise designed to calm the waters. China has blocked consensus, sensibly pointing out that such a statement would only roil the waters more.
At the same time, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson just returned from Pyongyang with the outlines of a possible deal that could bring the disputing parties back to the negotiating table. North Korea is willing to allow back UN nuclear inspectors, send fuel rods out of the country, and establish a hot line between the two Koreas and the United States. While in Pyongyang, Richardson urged the North Korean leadership to show “maximum restraint” in dealing with South Korea’s drills.
Today North Korea followed Richardson’s advice. Now it’s the South Korean and U.S. turn to show maximum restraint. By following up on the offer on the table, all sides can step away from the precipice and go back to pursuing reunification the old-fashioned way: by talking, not fighting.
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As partisan rancor in Washington shows no signs of abating, the calls for bipartisan approaches to politics are becoming stronger. While the devolution of our politics to what at times seems like shouting matches with both sides talking past each other is not a good development, there is reason to be wary of bipartisan politics as well. It is also worth noting that for most of the 20th century, while partisan fighting was intense, it was not always reinforced by ideology. For much of the 20th century, the Democratic Party included socialists and supporters of apartheid,while the Republican Party included radical free marketers and northern liberals who supported the New Deal. During these years it was not uncommon to read about the problems of the weakness of ideology in the American party system.
Things have, of course, changed since then as party politics are now linked to ideology to a far greater degree. This is also what has made partisanship more intense in Washington. The problem is not that the culture of cooperation and working together has changed, but that with fewer liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats, for example, there is genuinely less room for agreement between the parties than was the case a generation or two ago. Nonetheless, given the structure of our political system with its array of checks and balances, some degree of cooperation between parties is necessary to get anything done.
Similarly, while intense partisanship may be part of the political problem in Washington there are other parts that are equally significant. Some of these, such as the role of money in politics, are somewhat obvious. It is no accident that the most successful third party candidacy of the last fifty years, and the most talked about potential third party candidacy of 2008 and again in 2012, were those of billionaires able to spend extraordinary amount of their own money on their campaigns. If the only way out of the problem of hyperpartisanship is to turn to a self-funded billionaire, the problem is clearly more than partisanship.
Prominent people calling for new thinking about bipartisanship or new centrist approaches to solving our political problems are not only billionaires able to spend their own money, but they are politicians who have recently lost a primary or an election. If a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, a centrist is an incumbent who has lost a primary. Examples of this include like Charlie Crist and Mike Castle. There are exceptions such as Blanche Lincoln, who lost a general election, and Evan Bayh who decided he had enough and left the senate.
With leaders like Michael Bloomberg, Castle or Bayh, any centrist movement is at risk of becoming the refuge for ambitious billionaires and disgruntled defeated politicians. Bayh, Lincoln and Castle all worked in their respective parties for years, winning elections and getting reelected well into the current period of extreme partisan rancor. Crist and Bayh were even mentioned as potential running mates for John McCain and Barack Obama in 2008. It is hard to imagine a successful centrist movement built by people who spent decades on the inside before they realized there was something wrong.
More bipartisanship might make our politics more pleasant, but probably would not solve any of the major problems facing the country. Bipartisanship is essentially legislators of opposing parties treating each other civilly and occasionally compromising on key pieces of legislation. In the latter respect, perhaps surprisingly, President Obama has an extraordinary record of bipartisanship, tirelessly reaching across the aisle to incorporate key Republican ideas into his legislation.
It is additionally unlikely that a big picture problem like extensive partisan fighting will be solved by political insiders. One of the defining characteristics, and ironies, of our current political environment is that while more people than ever can inform themselves about politics, participate in debates and discussions and follow events in Washington closely, the division between ordinary Americans and the political class remains sharp, perhaps even sharper than in the past. In our political culture, the term “outsider” is something of a mockery referring to somebody who, like Sarah Palin has served as a governor rather than a senator. A workable centrism needs to develop from ordinary people, not political insiders. Unfortunately, most people who succeed, or even survive, in politics do so by becoming insiders, to even well meaning politicians and other political actors bring their own agendas to these processes.
A truly post-partisan framework for crafting policy and solving programs will require more than just compromises between the two parties-we already have this-but the ability to think differently about problems and to ask questions that are not currently asked. Questions like why we make education like a resource, whether we need a strategy for racheting down US involvement in the rest of the world, or what the post global economic crisis American economy might look like, are just some examples of questions that are not addressed by our politicians and are unlikely to be addressed by a smaller subset of politicians whose primary qualification is either having billions of dollars or having recently lost an election or primary.

This Blogger’s Books from
Uncertain Democracy: U.S. Foreign Policy and Georgia’s Rose Revolution
by Lincoln A. Mitchell

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As we near the end of 2010, I am taking stock of both the setbacks and highlights women have encountered in the past twelve months. After reviewing the year’s news headlines and latest statistics, I’ve compiled a list of what I believe to be the most significant events impacting women and families in our community this year.
Setbacks
1. In the last two years, the number of Chicago families living in poverty has risen from 40 to 45 percent. And for women-headed households, the situation was even worse – 29 percent of households headed by white women with children live in poverty, compared to 43 percent of African-American women and 46 percent of Latina women.
2. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that 75 percent of future jobs will require the use of computers in a significant capacity, with 60 percent of current jobs requiring information technology skills. Yet fewer than 33 percent of students in computer courses and related activities are female, with girls comprising only 17 percent of high school students taking AP exams in computer science. Women now make up over half the workforce, but account for less than 22 percent of working scientists, engineers, and computer professionals.
3. Our elected officials have yet to create a budget that addresses the state deficit yet funds social services for women, children and families. As of today, our state faces a $13 billion budget deficit potentially leaving our most vulnerable citizens with under-funded social services and support systems.
4. Out of all the candidates currently running for mayor of Chicago, only one is a woman. When women enter public life, they are more likely to sponsor policies that focus on what women need: health care, economic stability, education, housing, child care, anti-violence legislation, etc. The Center for American Women and Politics found that, when asked, women legislators are more likely to identify as top priorities women’s rights, health care and policies benefiting children and families more than their male counterparts. Without more women running for public office, the stability of our communities and families falters.
Highlights
1. In July, Illinois became the first state to require testing of every single rape kit gathered from reported sex crimes. Under this new law, investigating law enforcement agencies are required to submit all evidence of sexual assault to the crime lab within 10 days of receiving it from a hospital. This ensures that evidence is analyzed in a timely fashion, which will help with the prosecution of perpetrators.
2. This August, Gov. Quinn signed into law the Safe Children Act, which protects minors from being criminally tried for prostitution and instead places them in the care of child protective services. The average age an American girl is first trafficked into the commercial sex industry in the U.S. is 12 years old. This law will help childhood victims of sexual trafficking receive the support services they need and help prevent further abuse.
3. In the November elections, women comprised 53 percent of the electorate. While I always encourage all men and women to vote, it’s encouraging to see that women were in the majority of those committed to making their voices heard.
4. On both a national and local level, women reached historic milestones in public office. With Elena Kagan’s appointment, we now have three women serving on the Supreme Court. And in Chicago, Toni Preckwinkle became the first African-American female to be elected as Cook County board president.
5. While 1 in 4 women in Chicago are uninsured and 45 percent of women in the U.S. are uninsured or underinsured, the health care reform act signed this year by President Obama promises a better health care landscape for women in 2014.
While there are events worth celebrating, it’s clear we are still a long way from a community in which the needs of women and families are a priority. As the leader of an organization serving over 138,000 women, children and families annually, I am committed to making positive change in 2011. One of our mottos at YWCA Metropolitan Chicago is “strong alone, fearless together.” I truly believe that by educating people on the issues affecting women and families, we will build a community of citizens dedicated to social change. As you begin to think about your goals for the coming year, I hope you will consider joining me in this endeavor.

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