Moving on after divorce doesn't happen in neatly defined stages. It's an imperceptible process that happens while you're doing other things. It's halting--two steps forward one step back--one day you think you've moved on and then you regress--over and over again. The most important thing to remember is to keep forgiving yourself at each stage. If you regress and do dumb things, like sleeping with your ex (it happens) badmouthing him to the kids or making a scene at a family event, pick yourself up, brush yourself off and start all over again. Remember to tell yourself it's ok, you've been through hell and you deserve to screw up-- once, twice or a zillion times --until you're ready to stop screwing up.
One day you look up and realize you haven't thought about your ex or your marriage for a whole hour, then a whole day, a whole week, and so on. You get involved with other things; you catch yourself thinking about the project you're working on, or the guy you're involved with, what to invest your money in, how to help a friend, how your kids or grandkids are doing, redecorating your living room, buying a new house, a trip you've always wanted to take. Life, in all its complexity, just takes over. Your marriage recedes into the past, seeming almost as though it happened to someone else. You realize that you're doing things you never would have done when you were married and you congratulate yourself. The pain gets smaller and smaller, taking up less room in your consciousness.
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Wouldn't it be nice if someone would come forward with a real jobs program? Instead the debate in Washington is on things like tax cuts and what to do -- next year -- with health care and the budget deficit. These are important subjects, but none of them will have any near-term effect on the unemployment level (9.6 percent officially and probably 20 percent unofficially). It is no accident America largely turned one party out of office for another. A party in control of the White House and both houses of Congress that does not have a radical reemployment program at a time the sustained unemployment level is at a record high is not going to get a lot of sympathy.
Yet there is something which can be done immediately, which will have an impact on U. S. jobs, particularly in the manufacturing sector. The Democratic party can do this now; they still have control of the Senate. If they want to send a message to America, there is a step they should take when they get back for the lame duck session starting Monday. The Senate should pass the China currency bill which already passed the House of Representatives in September, and which will make it much more likely the Department of Commerce will impose duties on imports of products from China to offset currency manipulation. The bill would remove an objection the Department of Commerce raised when it refused to investigate currency manipulation in two trade cases earlier this year, and clear the way for trade investigations of this pernicious, unfair practice.
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President Obama will play the race card when he needs to play it. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. He shouted to a crowd at Bowie State University in Maryland not to make him look bad. The pitch to black voters is to get out in November and vote like your life depends on it. That means voting to save a slew of endangered Congressional Democrats. The stakes are well-known. A GOP grab of the House, even without the Senate, will almost certainly mean endless committee investigations of Obama administration actions, funding and appropriation stalls and sabotage, and a relentless no to every Obama initiative from energy to immigration reform. The escalation of congressional wars would be distracting, debilitating, and pose deep danger to Obama's reelection bid in 2012.
Appealing directly to black voters for help is not a desperation move. It's a smart and necessary political move. Black voters are more than just the underpin of the Democratic Party. They also make up a significant percent of the voters in districts in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Alabama, Indiana, and Florida where endangered Democrats are battling insurgent GOP candidates to keep their seats. The strategic placement of black voters made the difference in Ohio, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania in 2008 in his White House win. In these states McCain gapped Obama with white blue collar, rural, and older white voters. Black voters filled in the gap. November is no different. Polls show that there is a high interest among black voters in the mid-term election. Apathy and indifference is not as endemic as assumed.
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Looks like Soul Daddy will not be celebrating Father's Day this year. Eater reports that two of its three locations, in New York and Los Angeles, closed yesterday after being open just a month. The "healthy soul food" chain was founded by America’s Next Great Restaurant-winner Jamawn Woods. Some of the investment money for the chain supposedly came from the show's judgesâ€"Chipotle founder Steve Ells, and chefs Lorena Garcia, Curtis Stone and Bobby Flay. The restaurant’s PR team stated that the owners want to “focus on developing the best restaurant†they can at the one remaining Soul Daddy, on the third floor of the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota.
Early feedback for Soul Daddy on Yelp and Chowhound has been decidedly mixed. Some complain that the restaurant’s concept is derivative of Chipotle; one review called it “just gross.†Soul Daddy is Wood’s first restaurant. Before winning the NBC reality show, he was the chef-owner of W3’s, a small catering company in Detroit.
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The 19-year-old boy-man is home for summer break, his first substantial period under our roof since leaving for college in August 2010, and this event is something to both ponder and celebrate. What used to be a given -- his being a daily part of family life -- is now a novelty. A delightful novelty, but a novelty nonetheless. As the woman who birthed the boy, I am left to ponder: how on earth did that happen?
I remain unconvinced that growing up and leaving home is just a required part of the program. In my own case it was, but in his -- well, somehow it strikes me differently. I've always 
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If Edith Wharton lived in the Age of Innocence, surely we now live in the Age of Deception. Lying seems to have taken center stage in the lives of our political leaders. Last week former presidential candidate John Edwards was indicted for misappropriation of campaign funds and lying about it -- concealing his extramarital affair and his illegitimate child along the way. Another recent potential presidential candidate, Mark Sanford, governor of South Carolina, forfeited all chance at the Oval Office by having an affair with an Argentine woman and lying about the use of state funds to fly down to South America for romps with her while claiming he was hiking the Appalachian Trail. Bodybuilder-turned movie star-turned governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger dominated tabloid headlines three weeks ago with the disclosure of his illegitimate child.
Now follows New York Congressman Anthony Weiner, whose comical name and clumsy dishonesty have so enraged the U.S. media. Only three years earlier, New York Governor Eliot Spitzer had to resign after his hotel trysts with high-priced call girls came to light. About that same time, Bernard Madoff scammed $65 billion via his gargantuan Ponzi scheme and led a cavalcade of lesser Ponzi artists to the courts for cheating and lying. Sports stars routinely lie as well, whether about illegal performance-enhancing drug use or their own sexual conquests, as we learned with A-Rod and Tiger Woods. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, has recently been charged with assaulting a maid in a Manhattan hotel room. He denies the charges and claims the sex was consensual. Is he lying? We don't know yet.
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The great battles of this turbulent era will keep going on for years to come. The ideologues who want no check whatsoever on the power of big business have declared war on the middle class, and want no one to get in their way. Governors like Scott Walker and John Kasich will brook no compromise in trying to destroy unions. Right-wing politicians who have long wanted to do away with Social Security and Medicare and pretty much all safety nets for the poor are getting more and more brazen: Speaker Boehner made clear last week his plans to go after Social Security and Medicare sooner rather than later. And it is not just economics: the extremists are coming after not just a woman's right to choose, but even birth control itself with their attempts to shut down family planning funding.
The good news is that, as I wrote in The Washington Post this weekend, these attacks on the things we hold dear are putting the "movement" back in the labor movement (and the women's movement, and the progressive movement). We are going to march and demonstrate, we are going to recall Wisconsin legislators and, once a year has passed, the Governor. We will win a citizen's veto ballot initiative fight in Ohio. And we will take on the ultimate patrons of conservative politicians, the billionaire extremists like the Koch brothers and the Wall Street bankers who are providing the money and pulling the strings for this attack on the middle class.
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The Anthony Weiner sex scandal reveals why American politics is riddled with mediocrity. We live in a society so obsessed with uncovering the secret lives of public figures -- and holding them to absurdly unrealistic moral standards -- that only the naïvely optimistic, the mediocre, the hypocrite, the criminal or the totally clueless ever dare run for public office. They either don't know any better, have criminal intent or have everything to gain and little to lose. The smart ones with solid, stable careers and home lives hesitate to venture outside the relative safety of an anonymous life to distinguish themselves in any way. They fear humiliation at best -- and the utter destruction of their lives and careers at worse -- should they make an innocent misstep, or the media discover they had an impure thought or committed any kind of sexually adventurous act in their private lives.
Rarely in modern American politics do we find true leaders anymore who inspire and guide us with their wisdom. Among the current crop of career politicians -- those who have so far survived the harsh, invasive light of media scrutiny -- one is hard-pressed to find men and women of vision, personal courage and unwavering conviction. Instead you find hard-core professionals with public speaking coaches, image consultants, researchers and advisers to help them craft their positions on every issue. They have PR mavens to shape their public images; hairstylists to comb their hair and wardrobe consultants to select their clothes; and scores of other support staff that would make the massive posses of the most egocentric celebrity green with envy.
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The researcher Simon Baron-Cohen's declaration that "[i]t has never been a better time to have autism" (The Independent, Jan. 21, 2007) strikes many of us as ironic. But then we know what it means: it is a promising and exciting moment in the field. Who can predict what wonders will emerge from brain, drug, developmental and educational research? Will we find the causes of autism and promise for prevention? Will we discover precise genetic or molecular lesions and repair them? While these strides are exciting and promise better outcomes for the child with autism, I would argue that the field continues to neglect a key aspect of these children: their internal, emotional lives.
When I began graduate school in the 1980s, child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim's belief that emotionally cold and unavailable mothers caused their children's autism (The Empty Fortress, 1967) had already been shown to be a tragic falsehood. While the biological basis of Asperger's was a given at most universities and medical centers, the developmental facts were especially prominent at the University of North Carolina, where I attended graduate school. When I encountered my first case of Asperger's, I met a 6-year-old boy as disabled as my education had trained me to expect. He spun, flapped, referred to himself in the third person and echoed what he said. In addition to odd speech and motorisms, he insisted on sameness and had no tolerance for frustration. He made no eye contact, had severe social difficulties, rejected his mother's affection and was tested in the Borderline range of intellectual functioning. Clinicians at Boston's best hospitals had diagnosed him as having Infantile Autism.
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Your past, with all its beautiful and haunted memories, is written in your mind. What if you could learn how to access your past and "re-truth" it? In other words, what if you could re-write your past? Would you find this liberating? Your past and learning how to mine it is what connects you to your calling in life. No matter who you are or what business you are in, your story is what connects you to others. Understanding your story is key. By creatively reflecting, analyzing, understanding and recasting what happened in your past, you can become more empowered and fulfilled in your present.
My publisher, Michael Wiese Productions, recently introduced me to John Schuster, author of The Power Of Your Past: The Art of Recalling, Recasting and Reclaiming. They felt that John and I would have a lot in common because of my book, Story Line: Finding Gold In Your Life Story. In it, I teach writers how to mine the gold from their pasts and fictionalize their truth in their writing. I was immediately fascinated by the concept of John's book. I could see the connection in our themes. My book explores how to look into your past, draw from your emotional truth and fictionalize it in your writing while John's book delves into how you can actually 'extract' those truths from your past. I was particularly intrigued by his concept that you can "re-truth" your past. John writes, "Once you begin to 're-truth' your past with balanced and thorough reflection, you are more free to choose a future that you want, not the ones determined by your compressions."
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Although science prides itself on objectivity, it has some cherished articles of belief. If you question them, however reasonably, you can expect ire and raised hackles. Bruce Lipton has discovered this after posting "Has Modern Science Bankrupted Our Souls?" In it he challenges basic assumptions of modern science, such as the pre-eminence of a Newtonian physical universe and the conception of evolution through random mutations for being flawed. Natural selection and random mutation no doubt played a part in getting us where we are now, but they won't carry us into the future. The controversy being stirred up is old and, so far as Darwinists are concerned, completely settled. On one side is the light of reason, on the other darkness and superstition. The fact that Bruce Lipton is a cell biologist doesn't mean that his credentials protect him. People don't take kindly to having their faith questioned.
But the issue here isn't about bringing Darwin down, but rather about expanding his theory. Lipton's post reflects the urgency of future evolution, or where we grow from here. He poses the potential threat of mass extinction and the ruin of the planet (very real threats, even if you don't push as hard as he does). After painting a doomsday portrait of the future, Lipton offers hope, saying that humans will make exciting breakthroughs if we face our hour of crisis by evolving to the next stage of consciousness. As the author of a book titled "The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness," Lipton stands at the forefront of a growing movement. Some cutting-edge scientists belong to the movement, although it has roots in the new spirituality as well.
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When President Obama says: "I am concerned about the fact that the recovery that we're on is not producing jobs as quickly as I want it to happen," the people feel there is no recovery. And when Mark Zandi says on ABC: "We've dug ourselves into a big hole, and it's going to take a long time to dig ourselves out," the people feel that we're still digging. The people are right. It's not an economic cycle; it's a trade war. Globalization is nothing more than a trade war, and Washington is refusing to fight. The President and Congress refuse to fight because their biggest contributor, Corporate America, is making out like gangbusters with off-shoring profits and no concerns of labor, health, safety, environment and legacy. Wall Street and the big banks want to keep these off-shore profits flowing so the business and financial elite, together with their economists, act as if anything is done to compete in this war, it will start a trade war. The President and Congress don't want to do anything to turn off their contributors, so they join in the charade.
The President and Congress encourage the off-shoring of our economy with a tax benefit. Corporate taxes are exempted on off-shore profits unless repatriated, so the incentive is to reinvest for more off-shoring. If Boeing off-shores its production to Japan or China, the government gives Boeing a tax exemption. But if Boeing locates production in South Carolina, the government sues Boeing. President Obama appoints the champion of off-shoring the economy, Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, to create jobs in the United States. GE has already off-shored a majority of its production and jobs, and, shortly after his appointment, Immelt off-shored a $550 million research center to Brazil.
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Only 140 kilometers from our Berkeley office, the Folsom Dam towers 100 meter high over the American River. When it was built in the 1950s, the project was supposed to withstand the most severe flood in 250 years. Yet after it was completed, strong floods suddenly became more frequent and overtopped the dam at several instances. Until a safety upgrade goes forward, 440,000 people in the downstream area are exposed to the highest level of flood risk in the US. Scientists have now found evidence that the project's problem may be partly of its own making, and that dams can in fact kick up a storm.
We have known for a long time that dams can influence local rainfalls. Humidity evaporates from reservoirs and irrigated fields and gets recycled as rainfall. Dams and levees can reduce evaporation and rainfalls when they drain wetlands and open up woodlands for deforestation. The Niger Delta in West Africa is an example. In September, the delta's wetlands extend to 30,000 square kilometers -- roughly the size of Belgium -- and feed rainfalls over a much larger region. Yet existing and proposed dams on the Niger would reduce the river's flow by almost half. Christopher Taylor of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology warns that this could "significantly reduce" the seasonal window when the delta induces rainfalls.
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On the heels of the Walsh Brothers' epic planking around the city (they hit the Griffith Observatory, Santa Monica Pier, and Rodeo Drive), Jimmy Kimmel jumped on the planking bandwagon last night when he "sent" old Uncle Frank to plank around Los Angeles. Uncle Frank outdoes the Walsh Brothers with trips to the Hollywood sign and Randy's Donuts -- as well as a few other spots around the world.
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Recently there has been a police push back against citizen recording of "police business". As reported recently by National Public Radio, the ubiquitous presence of cell phones and other personal recording devices has meant that citizens can record arrests or other police actions, but unfortunately the police and prosecution response far too often has been to arrest the recorder, charge them with illegal wiretapping or obstruction and far too often to place that person in the position of facing felony charges. Dennis Slocumb, who is vice president of the International Union of Police Associations, AFL-CIO and is a thirty-two year veteran of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, recently published an op-ed, "Respect Officers' Rights," in which he advocates not criminalizing such conduct. Slocumb does also caution that someone looking at the recording needs to understand its context, and what may have happened before the taping started. A fair point -- one that should apply equally to recordings of defendants in custody in my view.
Slocumb's point that officers should behave as though they are always being recorded is a sound one. There is a big difference between interfering in an officer's ability to do his job, and recording what is going on from across the street. In impoverished neighborhoods and towns, there is a strong distrust of the police, and a consequent refusal to assist the police in solving crimes. One way to dispel that distrust would be for the citizenry to feel free to record what they see. As Radley Balko has written, not allowing recording -- or at least criminalizing such recordings -- erodes trust in the police. I am certain that nearly everything the public would see would be good by-the-book police work, by police officers who respect and care about behaving in a respectful and just way.
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Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, it turns out, had it all wrong. It was Jefferson who famously wrote that "if a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be," and it was Franklin who described the goal of education as "consisting of an inclination joined with an ability to serve mankind, one's country, friends and family." Jefferson founded the University of Virginia and Franklin the college that became the University of Pennsylvania in an effort to make tangible this vision for higher education in a democratic society. To their efforts and those of others we owe the creation of the distinctively American education in the "liberal arts" -- that is, education aimed to maximize the benefits of living in a state of freedom -- and the formation of a higher education system that is unique in the world.
What Jefferson and Franklin missed, apparently, is the fact that higher education is instead a commodity whose value can and should be measured chiefly or even exclusively in economic terms. Peter Thiel, PayPal founder, tech entrepreneur, hedge fund manager, and billionaire, has drawn much attention for arguing that higher education is at present a "bubble" along the lines of the housing market and tech stocks because "people are not getting their money's worth, basically, when you do the math." (Since Franklin wrote about virtually everything, I have been searching for his essay on the value of tech stocks to a flourishing democracy. I haven't found it, but I assume I will.) He has drawn even more attention for his recent creation of the Thiel Fellowship, a program that offers $100K to each of 20 budding entrepreneurs under the age of 20 -- provided that they drop out of college to pursue their financial dreams. And, perhaps, create along the way a company or two in which Mr. Thiel's hedge fund might invest.
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At 1:30 p.m. this Wednesday, June 15th, in the Thomas Eagleton Federal Courthouse in St. Louis, Missouri, an appeal will be argued before three judges on the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals in one of the most bitterly contested and controversial criminal trials in many years. The appeal -- United States v. Sholom Rubashkin -- involves Rubashkin's conviction of multiple counts of bank fraud, for which he was sentenced to 27 years imprisonment. His trial followed the 2008 raid -- the biggest in U.S. history -- by more than 600 federal Immigration and Customs agents (ICE) on Rubashkin's kosher meat-packing plant in Postville, Iowa and the arrest of 389 undocumented workers, mostly Mexican. Rubashkin was arrested for immigration-related crimes, but re-arrested and tried on the financial crimes. Whether Rubashkin is guilty and deserves the astonishingly harsh sentence are pertinent issues that will be argued on his appeal. But just as pertinent -- maybe more so -- is the conduct of the judges, trial and appellate, called upon to administer justice in his case. (Full disclosure: Co-author Gershman has signed amicus briefs on behalf of Rubashkin).
The central claim on Rubashkin's appeal is that the federal judge who presided at Rubashkin's trial and sentence, and who imposed a prison sentence greater than even the prosecutors asked for, and that six former United States Attorneys General -- Nicholas Katzenbach, Ramsey Clark, Edwin Meese, Richard Thornburgh, William Barr, and Janet Reno -- and seventeen former federal prosecutors and high-ranking Justice Department officials have decried as an unbelievably harsh punishment for a first-time, non-violent offender, "appeared" to be heavily involved with the government prosecutors and federal agents in planning and carrying out the unprecedented raid. Internal government documents, discovered by Rubashkin's lawyers for the first time after his trial, showed that the trial judge -- who is, indeed, the Chief Judge of the Federal Court in Cedar Rapids, Iowa -- met frequently, sometimes weekly, with the prosecutors and law enforcement agents in planning and executing the raid for six months before the raid and Rubashkin's arrest, in which the following was discussed:
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In the latter years of his Senate career, Evan Bayh won every single battle he fought. A less effective stimulus package? Bayh fought for it and won. Defeats for EFCA and cap and trade? Check. The public option stripped from the Affordable Care Act? Despite the fact that Bayh told David Axelrod and and Jim Messina that the mood of his fellow moderate Democrats was that "We're all screwed if you don't get something real on health care," and made it clear in December of 2009 that "the health care measure was the kind of public policy he had come to Washington to work on" and that he "did not want to see the satisfied looks on the faces of Republican leaders if they succeeded in blocking the measure," Bayh backed the watering down of the Affordable Care Act and got his way on that too.
But Bayh really, really wanted the Senate to create a special deficit commission (the President's own commission not being sufficient, for some reason), and when he didn't get his way on that, he quit the Senate in a snit and rode his waaah-mbulance back to Indiana, vowing, "If I could create one job in the private sector by helping to grow a business, that would be one more than Congress has created in the last six months.â€
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This week, a bit of controversy erupted in Washington when it was announced that the performance of Malek Jandali, a Syrian musician, had been dropped from the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee's (ADC) annual convention. It appears that Jandali had insisted on including "Watani Ana," a song about freedom, in his repertoire -- and that some leaders at ADC had been equally insistent that the song be dropped. With no meeting of the minds, Jandali was dropped from the program.
Bloggers, especially those looking for a way to draw blood from an Arab-American organization, had a field day with the story. The irony of a civil rights organization refusing to allow a song about "freedom" was an open invitation to critics, as were suggestions that a few ADC leaders acted as they did out of support for the regime in Damascus. For more than 24 hours, the Arab-American group said nothing, ensuring that the story would grow legs. When they finally issued a statement, it was so infuriatingly oblique and/or evasive, that the situation went from bad to worse. By not addressing whether the Jandali performance had been banned and by not dealing with any of the issues raised by such an action, the wound created by the initial decision festered. As a result, several speakers scheduled to appear at the ADC convention (both those from the Obama administration and leading civil rights activists from across the U.S.) were forced to agonize over whether or not to participate in the event. In the end, most speakers did attend out of respect for the Arab-American community, but added comments making clear their disagreement with the decision on Jandali.
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The tension between the essence of spiritual teachings and the harmful fundamentalism that often arises in the name of religion is an issue that has engaged my mind practically as far back as I can remember. I recall in my childhood asking, "How is it that hatred could fester in the name of a loving God?" Experiences of religious discrimination had traumatized my young, impressionable mind. Whereas religious prayers sing of peace and harmony, religion has divided human beings through an atrocious history of enmity and bloodshed. Yet, behind the veil of superficiality and hypocrisy, I always believed in the inherent beauty of God that lies at the essence of all true spiritual paths.
This childhood intuition of mine would become a guiding principle in my life and eventually shape my future in ways that I could never have imagined. As a 19-year-old, I set off on a journey to find God. On a path fraught with danger, I hitchhiked from Europe through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. After six months I arrived at the Indian border haggard, sickly and covered in dust. I was a penniless pilgrim, but full of excitement in anticipation of the riches of wisdom lying just beyond this final hurdle. Naively, I handed my passport to the boarder guard. "How much money do you have?" I had 26 cents. "We have enough beggars, go back!" she replied. For six hours I pleaded. For six hours I received verbal assaults, threats and rejection until, after the changing of the guard, a sympathetic Sikh gentleman finally relented and allowed me entrance. For me, it would be an entry not only into the nation of India, but also into a vast spiritual tradition -- rather, a fusion of traditions, commonly known as Hinduism. This would serve to develop my understanding of the world and my place in it, and radically transform nearly every aspect of my life.
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Some time ago I wrote a blog post in which I argued, contrary to the current political wisdom (is that an oxymoron?) and education policy that the problem with public education in America is not lousy teachers or failing schools. Rather, failing students are the problem, specifically, students we enter the public school system wholly lacking in the attitudes and skills necessary for academic success. In that post, I hold the parents responsible for this absence of educational preparedness. But I would never consider punishing the parents of unprepared students because there are far too many economic and cultural barriers that exist to place the "blame" so squarely on their shoulders. To reiterate, hold responsible, yes, punish, no.
Yet, a recent article in the New York Times indicates that punishment is exactly what some states are beginning to mete out to parents of struggling students. Recent state laws being proposed or that have already been enacted in states as diverse as Florida, Alaska, and California decided that "If a student is behaving badly, punish Mom and Dad." For example, in Alaska, if a student is missing a lot of school and his grades decline as a result, his parents can be fined $500 a day for every day the student misses school. In California, if a student misses school without a legitimate explanation more than ten times in a semester, the school district can ask the district attorney to press charges against the parents that could result in fines of up to $2500, a year in prison, and court-ordered parenting classes.
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Nathan Myrhvold thinks he can make a better burger than Daniel Boulud. In a symposium commemorating the 10th anniversary of the foie gras-filled db burger, the author of $600 tome Modernist Cuisine said his scientific experimentation has led him to a recipe for the perfect burger. He poaches ground beef patties sous vide for half an hour, then plunges them in -321 °F liquid nitrogen for 30 seconds, freezing the very outer layer. Finally, he deep-fries the burgers, ensuring a crispy shell without a gray interior.
This isn't the first time chefs have tried to use liquid nitrogenâ€"largely associated with avant-gardists like Ferran Adria and Heston Blumenthalâ€"to perfect fast food staples. Technophiles have been making liquid nitrogen ice cream for decades. And Top Chef All-Stars-winner Richard Blais recently demonstrated his liquid nitrogen-based technique for Cap'n Crunch milkshakes on Kitchen Daily. But unless you, too, made millions at Microsoft, don't get too excited about trying it yourself. Though liquid nitrogen itself is dirt cheap, you need an insulated Dewar flask to contain it safely. The smallest Dewar on kryogenifex.com alone costs $460. Add in the price of a sous vide machine and enough beef for liquid nitrogen practice, and you'll be spending as much as you would on scores of $32 burgers at DB Bistro Moderne.
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2011 has begun with a bang. January saw Sudan split in two; February, great upheaval in the Middle East; March, a tri-fold disaster in Japan. April, always a hectic month, saw historic numbers of tornadoes in the U.S. but also the resolution to the civil war in Cote D'Ivoire. On May 2nd President Obama declared that Osama bin Laden had been caught and killed in Pakistan right under the noses of our so-called partner's military town of Abbottabad. In so many ways, 2011 has been about waking up: awakening to the lifespan of dictators, the real dangers of nuclear energy, the proximity of the effects of global warming. Importantly, the youth of the Middle East, and their parents behind them, finally reached critical mass in their belief that change was possible and they could speak for and make it themselves. These revolutions are as much about the awakening of the people to their own power as they are wake-up calls for regimes under which they suffered. Despotism, given the right mix of youth, anger and joblessness, will always fail in the end. Time is essentially on the people's side. It is now time for the remaining stalwarts of the world to awaken -- none more so than the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)/military complex.
They have been called many names in the wake of events which revealed that Osama bin Laden, America's public enemy number one, lived for years in a compound within earshot of Pakistan's military academy in Abbottabad. Were the Pakistani military and its intelligence arm incompetent or complicit? The Pakistanis cannot both get American military aid meant to help them find bin Laden and not come under severe heat for not finding him when he was in their very own backyard. And yet they are. Speaking before the Pakistani Parliament, Intelligence Chief Shuja Pasha condemned the raid against bin Laden and emphasized that America's violation of Pakistani sovereignty was unacceptable. At the close of the eleven-hour meeting, even those members of Parliament most skeptical of the ISI fell in ranks behind Pasha. His offers to resign have been denied. While Pakistani officials pretend to brew with anger at America's intrusion, they are not providing answers for the really important questions: why did America keep the ISI in the dark about the raid in the first place? Why was Osama bin Laden found in Abbottabad and why are so many other groups such as the Haqqani network still living in peace in Pakistan?
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Every now and again, a story appears that makes you realize that you've been trapped on the merry-go-round for way too long. The story in question appears Thursday in the Wall Street Journal, which quite properly examines the resurgence of "boutique" investment banks against "bulge bracket firms." (Both terms lack a certain precision, which no one seems eager to provide them; the notion of a "bulge bracket" is particularly dubious historically. But never mind, like the loose use of the word "bank," they've both become popular and ubiquitous.) The story is pegged to strong fourth-quarter earnings from predominately advisory shops like Lazard, Evercore and Greenhill & Co. These firms showed strong growth in advisory revenues, the paper reported, versus declines at the big boys, like J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc. Morgan Stanley was flat and that eternal outlier, Goldman, Sachs & Co., saw 9% growth, which given its market share, is a whopping increase.
Whether these numbers really justify the thesis of the story -- that they "highlight how the boutiques are slowly draining talent and business from Wall Street's behemoths, the so-called [ah, now it's someone else's fault] bulge-bracket firms" -- is really anyone's guess. After all, the quote the paper lines up to support that conclusion comes from Greenhill's chief executive Scott Bok, who is not only talking up his own book but who seems to be carefully describing market share gains over "the past year or so," not some fundamental talent shift.
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This is going to be a good year for you. Why am I so positive? I recently came across some evidence to back up my sunny forecast. My friend John C. Norcross, PhD, professor of psychology at the University of Scranton and coauthor of the book "Changing for Good," recently shared some research with me. According to his research published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology, between 40 percent and 50 percent of adults in the United States will make New Year's resolutions and two-thirds will concern life threatening behaviors (smoking, alcohol consumption, obesity). In fact, 40-46 percent of New Year's resolvers will be successful at six months. Contrary to conventional opinion, a considerable proportion of New Year resolvers do succeed. This gives me enormous hope and strengthens my resolve to help you with a very important resolution: helping you lose weight.
New Year's resolutions are a teachable moments, and Dr. Norcross shared with me that you are 10 times more likely to change by making a New Year's resolution than someone with identical goals and motivation who does not make a resolution. For the two-thirds of all Americans who are overweight or obese, this could be life saving information. The stark reality is that carrying excess body fat puts you at greater risk heart disease, cancer, diabetes and stroke. This is a resolution you must take very seriously. I want you to look at this year's resolution a little differently -- not as a promise to lose a certain amount of pounds but rather an investment in yourself because you are worth it.
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On May 24th of this year I wrote a piece for the Huffington Post called, "Why the Sex in Our Marriage Disappeared." It described an eight year marriage with little to no sex and the events leading up to that sorry state. I had 485 comments on the article in the Huffington Post and another fifty that came to my website, www.sharynwolf.com. Most were in support of my story and very empathic, although a substantial number of people said, "you stole the best years of his life" and "I'm sick and tired of the man being blamed..."
I would say about half the responses to the article were from other people caught in sexless marriages. There were an infinite number of reasons that they gave; one partner had been caught cheating. The wife went through menopause and the husband says she lost desire. Fighting kept them in separate beds. An illness made sex difficult. And, sometimes there was no discernable reason. The sex just died. And, each person who wrote me said that no one but they knew what was really going on behind closed doors. These couples appear to be happy and their lack of sex is a total secret to the world. Many said they could not believe that the whole world saw them as well adjusted couples when they were anything but. Some couples were miserable in this status, while a decent number had become numb to it long ago and took it for granted. Some even said they had good marriages and that sex was a very small part of what makes a good marriage--companionship was much more important to them.
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I miss him. It's as simple as that. No long, rambling stories recounted, no wisps of nostalgia or idle memories rekindled. I simply miss my brother. As ALS Awareness Month comes to an end in the United States and begins in both Canada and France (les Journées d'Action), I have decided to join together with other voices and help spread awareness of this destructive, devastating disease. I lost my brother Michael to Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, ALS, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig's Disease after the famous New York Yankee whose career and life were cut short by this terrible illness. ALS is a progressive degenerative motor neuron disease characterized by muscle atrophy, weakness leading to the near or complete loss of motor function and mobility, increasing difficulty in swallowing and breathing and eventually leading to a complete shutdown of the body. To put it in simple terms, the connection between brain and muscles dies, the messages for control no longer get through and involuntary muscle functions (beating heart, working lungs) slowly fade away. Unlike the more famous, long-term sufferers of ALS such as Stephen Hawking, my brother withered away from a rare form of this disease in a mere two years; and unlike Mr. Hawking who continued his brilliant career despite ALS, my brother was crippled by dementia as well. And although my father had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease, we suspect - and fear - that he, too, succumbed to the same rare strain of ALS as did his son. Much too often, as was our case, the disease swallows up the loved one both physically and mentally, allowing us, the family, barely the time to prepare financially, legally, emotionally or psychologically.
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As Elizabeth Warren says, "Nothing will ever replace the role of personal responsibility." Just as the FDA doesn't prevent overdoses, the point of consumer protection regulations isn't to come to the rescue of people who simply don't want to pay back the money they owe. But debt collection agencies have started using outrageous tactics to get payments on debt. These companies buy up bad debt from lenders -- credit card companies, phone companies, health care providers, you name it -- for cheap and then hunt down the money owed in order to turn a profit. And in doing so, some act more like organized crime than private businesses.
They harass consumers with threats and obscenities. Complaints about debt collectors filed with the Federal Trade Commission, the agency tasked with regulating these operations, rose by about 17% in 2010, which is nearly three times the number of complaints filed in 2002. They account for 27% of all those lodged with the FTC. And of the 54,147 consumers complaining to state level authorities in South Carolina, 4,182 said debt collectors had threatened violence. In 2005, 8,000 consumers told the FTC that debt collectors had used obscene or profane language, according to "Up To Our Eyeballs." But it's not always just about outright harassment. It's also a mind game. A former debt collector has anonymously blogged about some of the tactics he used, describing how he would "sound educated enough to perform some sort of legal action" by dropping four important phrases: office, file, client, and flat refusal to pay. This careful use of language was often enough to scare consumers into coughing up some money.
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Judging by how Oklahoma voted in the recent election, one might conclude that despite its tiny Muslim population, Oklahoma was on the verge of becoming an Islamic caliphate in Middle America. The reality is of course far different. Oklahoma State Question 755, which passed, asked voters whether state courts should be forbidden "from considering or using Sharia Law." Similar legislation is being considered in Tennessee, and Louisiana recently became the first state to pass several bills banning international law from its courts. Although the Louisiana bills didn't mention shariah explicitly, they were apparently motivated at least in part by a similar distaste for Muslims and their religious law, and a desire to "protect" constitutional law. These constitutional law protectors appear, however, to be a little fuzzy on what constitutional law actually means, how it allows for various forms of religious arbitration and what the state can and cannot do to regulate religious freedoms.
In the discussion and debate surrounding Question 755, supporters in search of an example where the bogeyman shariah was permitted inside American courtrooms kept pointing to a New Jersey case where the court denied a restraining order to a woman who was sexually assaulted by her then-husband. The judge ruled that the husband did not have a "criminal desire to or intent to sexually assault" her as the husband was merely under the impression that he was exercising his prerogative as a husband under Islamic law. What's rarely reported, however, is that the decision was promptly overturned on appeal because the application of shariah, or the "cultural defense," conflicted with civil law.
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One of the most amazing things about the trade war we are fighting is that the U. S. government often does not appear to know we are even in a war. But if you go to any manufacturing town in this country, and look at the empty storefronts and the broken down plants, talk to a taxi driver or a Dunkin Donut clerk who used to work in the local factory for triple his current wage, it is clear we are in a war and it is one we are losing.
First, let's be clear. It is not that manufacturing has left the planet earth. That is basically the line of the apologists for our failed trade policy -- that there is some kind of natural shift to a post-manufacturing economy. But that is simply not the case -- it is just that the jobs and the plants have left the United States. We have lost 8 million manufacturing jobs in the last several decades and are now at about 11.7 million. But China has over 100 million people employed in manufacturing. If we had a policy which resulted in recovering even a fraction of these jobs from China we would be showing long term manufacturing job growth, not decline. Similarly, our trade deficit in high technology goods is steadily growing. In 2009 we had a $56 billion trade deficit in these goods, up from a $37 billion deficit in 2006, and a positive balance of $5 billion in 2000. It's not that these goods are not being manufactured any more, it's just that they are not being manufactured here.
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